Since completing a Bachelor of Fine Arts at CCAC in Oakland, she has studied indigenous weaving with Guatemalan natives on the shores of Attitlan, traditional Japanese papermaking in a paper village in Aichi-ken, Japan and in the last 28 years, she has directed her own art school L’Art Vivant in Soreze, a rural French village as well as creating her own art gallery in Collioure on the Mediterranean where Matisse painted.