I was born in New York city . My mother was from Brooklyn and my dad was from the Bronx. We moved to Alaska when I was four because he was working for the government and rather than go to be a medic in the Korean war, he opted to go to Alaska. There he worked for the bureau of Indian affairs as a tuberculosis specialist. At that time I was strongly influenced by the sculpture in Alaska and everything that we saw on the way there: Mount Rushmore and the stone sculpture done by the native Americans in Alaska. The totem poles just floored me! I loved them! At the same time my mother was an art teacher, a potter and a painter. I frequently went with her to the hospital to teach art classes. Everything she did was art related, so my whole upbringing was geared towards the life I live now. My father was as great an art lover as she was and we traveled a lot. We drove from Alaska to New York and back four times in four years, to visit the family. But for my parents, traveling anywhere was only to go to the museums. You come to a city, you find the museums, you go through all of them, which was fascinating for me. Of course as a little girl it was also exhausting, that's a lot of walking. But as I grew up, everything was art. Christmas was the opportunity to make everything that went on the tree. We started making our paper mache masks for Halloween by August and they were a great production. Of course Easter eggs were another big production. Life was art for us.

So by the time I was in fifth grade, I had apparently, my mother tells me, announced that I was going to be an art teacher and by the time I was in tenth grade I remember clearly having made the decision to be a sculptor. When I announced that to my parents. They were thrilled because for them, to have one of their daughters actually decide to pursue art as a career was just the most wonderful thing in the world. That was very great for me because that meant that they were committed to do anything and everything to get me from point A to point B. So they sent me to France, I studied art in Fontainebleau right out of high school for the summer. I studied sculpture there and then I moved on to BU where I majored in sculpture, so everything else has come from that.