A New Yorker by birth, as a teenager, I escaped to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with my bagged lunch, every Saturday morning for several months of each high school year. At sixteen, I enjoyed a painting scholarship from the American Art School, in NYC, then went on to receive a B.F.A. from Pratt Institute, in Brooklyn, NY, and an M.S. at SUNY New Paltz. At the Edwin MacDowell Art Colony, in Peterborough, NH, I was awarded a summer painting fellowship.