I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, and spent many hours exploring the hiking trails on the Peninsula and in the East Bay. I've been very fortunate to be able to spend the majority of my professional life doing what I love: working in the field, from the wetlands of San Francisco Bay to the vernal pools of the Central Valley; from the coastal scrub of San Diego to the meadows of Mendocino, with a slight detour to Alaska. I earned B. S. and M. A. degrees from San Jose State University where I studied botany and ecology (and sand dunes!), and then landed my first job as the staff biologist for the San Francisco Bay Bird Observatory, where I became intimately familiar with the waterbirds nesting all around the South Bay. From there I moved on to monitoring the ecological success of mitigation projects. All the while, I attended biological illustration workshops and drawing classes wherever I could find them. Finally gathering my courage, I applied to, and was accepted in, the prestigious Science Illustration Program at the University of California Extension, Santa Cruz. I am excited to be contributing drawings to the upcoming new edition of The Jepson Manual, Higher Plants of California as my internship for the program. Now, I am embarking on a freelance career in science illustration, with an eye toward illustrating the interesting things I've observed in the field over the years.