I’m a lifelong traveler, having grown up bilingual and bicultural, with two countries (the United States and Sweden) to call home. Since my first plane trip (from Boston to Stockholm) at the age of five months, I’ve ridden a camel in the Gobi, braved the winds at Cape Horn, searched for rhinoceros from the back of an elephant in Nepal, snorkeled with sharks in the Galápagos, camped on a beach in the Ecuadorian rainforest, rafted the Zambezi River below Victoria Falls, ventured into ancient Egyptian tombs, tubed through a cave filled with glowworms in New Zealand, climbed Mayan pyramids in Mexico, and come face-to-face with the massive moai heads of Easter Island. From my Swedish mother and my Norwegian-born grandfather I learned to love the natural world, spending a big part of my childhood summers out of doors. When not exploring the woods, lakes, archipelagos, fjords, and mountains of Scandinavia, I was climbing trees and building backyard fortresses in leafy suburban Massachusetts.
I’ve also been a writer for most of my life, at least since the third grade, when a friend and I wrote a series of plays about a family of walking, talking (and ice skating) paper bags. That was just the beginning. After a few detours into other fields, I have now been working in communications for more than 15 years, including over 10 years as a freelance writer, editor, and translator. In addition, I have been photographing people and places around the world for nearly two decades and have accumulated an extensive portfolio of travel images.
A native speaker of both English and Swedish, I am also fluent in Spanish and speak varying degrees of German, French, Italian, and Portuguese. My degrees are in environmental studies (B.A. from Middlebury College) and Latin American studies (M.A. from the University of Arizona), and I also studied international development at Uppsala University in Sweden. As an undergraduate I spent a semester in Ecuador focusing on comparative ecology and environmental issues, while as a graduate student I conducted research in Mexico City on the relationship between environmental groups and the media.
Alongside my communications work, I am a freelance tour manager, leading several international trips per year for specialty travel programs including museum, nonprofit, and university alumni groups. Recent tours have taken me to such destinations as Egypt, New Zealand, Mongolia, Italy, Patagonia, the Galápagos, Japan, and Central Europe. I also do occasional local guiding in the Seattle area and previously worked with mainstream tour companies leading adult and student tours throughout the United States and Canada.
