Bio

I have a BA in Individualized Studies from NYU’s Gallatin School with a concentration in East Asian Studies. After NYU I worked as an English teacher in Taiwan for two years and became fluent in Mandarin Chinese.

I have an MS in Foreign Service from Georgetown. Throughout my graduate studies I focused on the international AIDS epidemic. After school I worked first at a public health consulting firm, helping them apply their expertise from domestic U.S. AIDS programs to the international AIDS epidemic, and then as an independent consultant, helping international NGOs specializing in sexual and reproductive health to adapt their programs to address HIV/AIDS. I’ve done AIDS-related work in Myanmar, Brazil, the Balkans region, and Kenya.

For personal reasons in my late 20s I wanted to live and work in Europe, so I applied for dual Italian citizenship based on ancestry. My great aunt in Bensonhurst and I sleuthed through old family letters and photos and found the names of the two towns outside of Naples where my great-grandparents were born. I wrote to the town halls asking for my great grandparents’ birth certificates, compiled birth, marriage and death certificates for four generations of my family, down to me, and took it all to the Italian consulate in New York. Not only did I get Italian citizenship for my whole family, but in the process my distant cousin, who lived in the same town where my great-grandfather was born, got my contact information from the town hall (his wife was the one who processed my papers) and wrote me an email inviting me to visit. So I went and visited this tiny picturesque town behind Mount Vesuvius where every second person I met had my great grandfather’s surname and was my cousin. I later moved to Italy for five years and learned Italian, and also studied film there. I made a documentary about an Italian language school in Venice, called Italiano per stranieri, reflecting my own experiences learning Italian in Italy, which won the “Avanti” Prize for New Directors at the 2008 Turin Film Festival.

After Italy I moved to London. There I joined a co-working office for startups and social enterprises, and later became in-house producer, making videos about my fellow entrepreneurs. Then, wanting a piece of the action myself, I joined a training program for entrepreneurs and worked on a concept for video-based knowledge management to help corporations share ideas internally between business units—before I realized I would rather be a writer and filmmaker than an entrepreneur. Instead of writing a business plan, I started writing a novel about my experience as an entrepreneur. That’s the novel I’ve been writing and am currently revising.