About the host:

After I graduated from NYU’s Undergraduate Film and Television program at Tisch School of the Arts, I had an adventurous few years as a radio journalist, when I went to Germany to co-anchor Deutsche Welle’s Across the Atlantic radio magazine that aired on US public radio stations.

My many versions include roles in the nonprofit sector as grant maker, fund-raising consultant and volunteer board member. I’ve also freelanced as a writer for shelter magazines and had a column in a local Gannett newspaper, The Putnam County Recorder-Dispatch.

When my kids were little, I became an early adopter of internet sales technology when I founded Drosselmeier’s Handcrafted Treasures from the Land of the Nutcrackers and sold German Christmas decorations in what was “the first season people bought stuff on the internet.” In 2016 I enrolled as anundergraduate at Columbia University, majoring in architecture, and graduated cum laude in May 2020, a week after my 60th birthday. As I told my kids, it was “the hardest, most challenging and most rewarding experience of my life. Everybody should do this.”

In my spare time, I am a vocal advocate for repairing ecologies and ecosystems with native plants. I am also an active member of my Presbyterian church, where I sing in the choir.