I am a 27 year old urban planner, freelance writer and activist. My work has been published in TreeHugger.com, Haaretz, The Jerusalem Post, Azure, GreenProphet.com, openDemocracy.net, Mondoweiss.net, Israel Indymedia and other publications. I have appeared on NPR and the BBC, and reported from Israel, the US and the UAE. I run a volunteer humanitarian initiative called Fugee Fridays that works with African refugees living in Tel Aviv.

My Bio (in a nutshell): I was born in Decatur, Alabama and grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. My mother was born in India and grew up in Queens, New York. Her parents were born in Burma, and theirs in Baghdad. My father was born in Tennessee to an Eastern European family.

At the age of 16, I left North Carolina to attend a religious boarding school in Memphis, TN. After deciding that life was too short to spend four years in high school, I made arrangements to graduate a year early.

At age 17, I arrived in Israel, where I spent some time studying Hebrew, volunteered on two kibbutzim, spent two weeks in a religious seminary and traveled a bit around the Middle East.

After returning home to North Carolina, I spent about eight months working at a local restaurant. After a short trip to London, where my friends from the kibbutz were renting a house, I spent a semester at Boston University, followed by a summer in Antigua, Guatemala, where I learned Spanish.

I returned to Israel in 2001 for a year of studies in Tel Aviv University’s international program, just in time for 9.11 and the peak of the Second Intifada. I stayed on after that for another three years at the university, majoring in Political Science. It was during this period that I discovered an interest in urban planning and the environment.

After finishing my BA, I spent eight months in South America, where I lived in Quito, Ecuador for several months, completed an apprenticeship in organic agriculture on a remote farm and studied urban design in Curitiba, Brazil. Latin America was in the midst of a profound political transition, which I was lucky enough to experience on the ground.

In 2006, I returned once again to Israel to study Urban Planning at the Technion in Haifa. In parallel, I took a Permaculture Design Course in Pardes Hana. During one of the many strikes that occurred during my graduate studies, I began to write for TreeHugger.

2008 was a busy and fruitful year. While commuting twice a week from Tel Aviv to the Technion in Haifa, I worked several jobs, became a freelance writer, co-founded Fugee Fridays and created this blog.

I am currently completing my MA and searching for an interesting job in urban planning and/or international development work.