Food and travel have been my twin passions since I was young. Growing up outside Washington, D.C., I used to host French crêpe parties for my friends and dream of being a world traveler. When I was 9, we lived in a prewar apartment building in Warsaw, Poland. For half a year, my siblings and I attended the local elementary school, Benito Juárez #5. Every morning, we marched into the gymnasium to sing a Communist solidarity song then learned our lessons in Polish. Even though I’ve long since forgotten the language, I can still sing that song by heart.

Over the years, I’ve traveled around and lived for a time in Italy, Sweden and Belgium, picking up a few languages along the way. My first published article chronicled a 3-day tapas crawl in Madrid (GEV Magazine, Issue 12, August 2014). I was GEV’s Travel Editor until the magazine went on hiatus in 2017 and still enjoy taking freelance assignments to share my finds in food, lodging and local culture.

When I’m not traveling or proselytizing about food, I’m a graphic designer, wife and mother of two sons. I moonlight as The Party Evangelist, a nickname bestowed upon me in a 2009 feature in SCENE, a Silicon Valley lifestyle magazine. The article, by Julia Prodis-Sulek, described my love of connecting people through food, drink, and face-to-face conversation, and a sideline business was born.

I’m also the author of a short parenting book, “dirt & sunshine: random thoughts on the art of raising children.”

More of my work may be found at:

• www.thepartyevangelist.com
• www.graystar.com
• www.dirtandsunshine.com

In 2017, I learned about the origin of the utopian neighborhood where I grew up. Created by Judi Francis and David Sloane, the mini documentary below traces the evolution of New Mark Commons, the brainchild of Edmund J. Bennett. A nature-conscious community planner, Bennett practiced a form of urban planning known as “situated modernism” where houses were modeled to fit into the natural landscape.