I was born in South Limburg, the beautiful south-eastern part of the Netherlands, and grew up in Deventer.

At age 21 I moved to Israel. For 26 years I lived in Tel Aviv, where I married, divorced, and worked in various office jobs -- as in-house translator, food import manager, and PA to the CEO of a software house. After many years of long, stressful days in the office, and coming home from work too exhausted to do much more than read a book or a magazine or be hypnotized by television, I completely forgot about the things that I love to do in life.

The turning point came when in October 2000 I was diagnosed with breast cancer. Initially I was devastated, but very soon I came to realize that this exigency presented a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to radically change my life. This realization actually saved me. The time had finally come to rediscover my dreams and start pursuing them!

After I finished all the treatments I left the company where I worked, and I started to dabble in digital art. My first works were based on old forest pictures that my father had taken in the Netherlands, and on old photographs of my grandparents that I enlarged and created artworks from. Dad is a very talented nature photographer, and a true inspiration for me. After a short while however, I decided that I wanted to use my own photographs, so I purchased my first SLR camera. And I rediscovered a long-forgotten passion: photography.

In 2001/2002 I studied photography with Mr. Yaakov Bornstein in Tel Aviv, mainly focusing on nature and landscape photography. During the weekends, until I left Israel, I organized photography field trips with fellow-students and photography-loving friends to various places in Israel.

In 2003 I left Israel and traveled to Australia, where I lived for one year in a tiny village in New South Wales. From there I traveled to Mazatlan, Mexico in January 2004, where I lived on and took care of a trimaran in Marina Mazatlan. There I met my husband Stephen, who one beautiful day arrived in Mazatlan on his sailboat "Tranquillity". Three weeks after we met I jumped ship, and the rest is history.

Stephen and I are (still) living on the "Tranquillity" and since 2004 we have been cruising and traveling the Sea of Cortez, the West Coast of Mexico, Costa Rica, Panama, and beautiful Ecuador. We are currently back in Mexico, in a boatyard in Guaymas, Sonora, to do maintenance work on the boat and enjoy life. We may be here for quite a while because we love Guaymas and the people here. After all, what's the hurry?

As the saying goes, "Man plans and God laughs", so our plans are firmly written in the beach sand at low tide.