After growing up and graduating with my Bachelor of Music in Music Education in the United States, I moved to Brazil to work on my Master of Music in Ethnomusicology in Salvador, a beautiful city on the ocean in the northeast. In 2009, I moved to São Paulo to teach music at St. Francis College, an international IB school, and became the Music Coordinator there. In 2011, I began a Doctor of Education program in International Education Administration and Policy at the University of Minnesota. I have always wanted to come back and live in Asia again; I studied abroad in Thailand for a semester and visited other nearby countries including China in 2002. So when the opportunity arose, I joined the BSB team as Director of Music in 2015. Due to our collaboration with Juilliard, my title changed to Director of Performing Arts in 2019 to include Drama and Dance.
I have dual citizenship as my mother is Brazilian and my father is American. I have always felt more Brazilian, and I believe Brazil’s amazing music is one of the reasons. In living in Brazil for 11 years, I had the opportunity to learn and teach many different styles of Brazilian music, which I hope to share with my students all around the world. I am primarily a pianist, but throughout my teaching career I have enjoyed working with all ages of students and all aspects of music – singing, percussion, ensembles, productions, and movement, to name a few.