I was born to a family of orchardists and mountain climbers in Hood River, OR.   A  sense of connection with place influences my work as a writer, actor, director and teacher.

Reading and writing were my first loves.   I started acting in the hi-jacked choral room of my rural high school, attended The Evergreen State College, WA, received my BA in Theatre Arts from Oberlin College, OH, and studied acting at Pasqualini- Smith Studio in Seattle, and U of WA Professional Actors' Training Program.  

Pasqualini and  Smith invited me to join the newly formed Freehold Theatre Lab Studio in 1991.  I also taught at Cornish College for the Arts.  I worked as an actor, creative collaborator, and director in the fringe theater scene through out my fifteen-year stint in Seattle.  To this day I see actors as the center of any theatrical endeavor.

Working as a teacher opened my eyes to the theatre's true potential:  Our ability to discover both the purpose and the tools to address the truth about our lives as human beings.   I am interested in the power theatre has to transform lives.

The practice of theatre taught me how varied, how multi-faceted the truth can be.  It is not flat.  It is dynamic.  On stage there's always more then one truth.  That is where plays most differ from dogma, most resemble our lives.

As a playwright, I’m interested in what theatre can do that can’t be done in other forms; scripts that embrace the live-ness of theatre, that would be less evocative as film or literature, that call on the bond between performer and audience, honor and strengthen it.