When I was three, my parents started a puppet theater company called “The Mystic Paper Beasts” and my sister and I traveled and performed with them through out the United States and Europe. My memories and journals from our travels led to the children's books, “The Year I Didn’t Go To School” and “Chloe’s Birthday… and me.”

            I graduated from Rhode Island School of Design in 1994 and spent my last year in Rome with RISD’s European Honors Program. Chronicle Books then published “Lucy’s Eyes and Margaret’s Dragon; Lives of the Virgin Saints,” a book of saint paintings and stories I made while I was in Rome.

            After moving to Brooklyn, I got my first freelance illustration job with the New Yorker. My New Yorker illustrations inspired a lucky chain of work with many magazines and children’s books.

            My first children’s book, “Mr. Semolina-Semolinus; a Greek folk tale” was published in 1997, and I have illustrated more than thirty books since then. I have illustrated my own stories and stories by such authors as Toni Morrison, Mary Pope Osborne, Ursula Hegi, Mathea Harvey and Gertrude Stein.

          I live with my husband and two daughters in the Hudson Valley.