This is my story, up 'til now that is.

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              When I was born, my mother and father lived in a small town in Pennsylvania on the Appalachian Trail.  That's where it all started.  I began my intrepid dance career wiggling my way around our living room to music and putting on shows for my parents, until one day they asked me if I wanted to take dance classes.  Did I ever!?

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I lived in that town for seven years until one day, my father came home from his job setting up support programs for soldiers and their families and said, “How would you like to move to Germany!?”  That’s where my love of adventure began.  We spent three years in Germany, adjacent to the military, living in a picturesque town on the Main River in Bavaria. While we were there I continued in dance, taking jazz and tap. The whole experience was magical, filled with culture and castles, festivals, foods and friends.  This was also where I had my first experiences with my magic(k)al spirituality.  

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When our tour was ended, we returned to the US, this time to central Massachusetts.  We’ve called it home ever since, almost twenty years now.  In that time, I made my way through middle school and high school, during which I forged a deep connection with the woods and nature, playing and, through play, developing the nature-based belief system that I follow today.  I played flute, spoke French, took honors classes, and, at the height of my perfectionism, graduated valedictorian.  In the midst of that time, so many things occurred, shaping who I am today including the loss of my father, who passed away just after I turned sixteen, as well as my journey through coming out as gay and as a pagan practitioner.  These events solidified in me the belief that, in life, you have to just go for it…live without regret. 

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And thus, I took the leap to major in dance and choreography, which I had let fall by the wayside for nearly a decade when we moved to Massachusetts.  Picking it up again was like coming home, though walking through the door was tough after such a long time away.  At Bard College, I began to study dance en pointe, on the toes, which is a ballet technique traditionally reserved exclusively for female dancers, hence my handle @manenpointe.  It was a bit of a dicey start and I had to push for it to be accepted within the school, but I did it, and eventually received a great deal of support from some amazing teachers.  Much of my choreographic work, then and since, has featured the exploration and use of pointe in non-traditional ways.

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Moving right along, after graduating from Bard, I entered the Dance Prism ballet company and have danced there, at least in some capacity, ever since.  For a time, I worked at Classic Elite Yarns, a knitting yarn distribution company.  This is also the time when I went to school for massage after an injury that kept me out of dance for a year.  I opened my own practice directly out of school and worked there for two years doing massage and energy work, and I loved it.  I still do.  It has become an intrinsic part of my spiritual work, fostering my connection to healing energy and helping people reach their goals and needs.

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And then there was Scotland!  In 2018, I was accepted into the Glasgow School of Art as a student in the Master of Letters in Fine Art Practice program, studying performance.  I spent my time there deepening the connection between my spiritual practices and my artwork.

 After graduation, when my visa expired and my time there was finished, I returned to Massachusetts and have been settled in, working through this crazy 2020 as a massage therapist, healer, artist, crafter, and dancer. 

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Heavens! That’s a lot and it continues to continue!  If you’ve made it this far, I thank you for sticking with it to find out a little bit about how I got to where I am now and hopefully where I am going.  I hope that this very broad overview gives you a sense of how my different aspects overlap into a cohesive wholeness as an artist, performer, and healer. 

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To find out more about each, feel free to look through my work, read the more specified statements on my art, performance and healing pages, and absolutely to contact me.  I am always happy to discuss art, healing, magic(k), spirituality and any number of other topics!  Thank you for reading!