My Story

I moved to Cleveland Heights in 1999 after moving around the country, living in vastly different communities: Newtown, CT; Baton Rouge, LA; Columbia, MO; Columbus, OH; Richmond, VA; and Toledo, OH. My husband and I landed in Northeast Ohio and chose to make Cleveland Heights our home. I have now lived here longer than I’ve lived anywhere else.

The experience of living in so many places, in diverse types of communities—from inside large city limits to a rural suburb, to a metropolitan suburb, and moving from place to place—provided me real insight on what I wanted for a home for my family. And Cleveland Heights is exactly what I wanted—walkable, diverse, welcoming, and rich with amenities, history, and cultural experiences. I have fallen in love with this place and can’t imagine raising my children anywhere else.

I graduated from the University of Richmond with a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, majoring in finance with a heavy focus on economics. I earned my Juris Doctorate from the University of Toledo College of Law and spent a year studying tax law at Case Western Reserve University School of Law, earning my LL.M. in Taxation.

For the past 24 years, I have represented closely held businesses, assisting them with everything from formation to dissolution, from contracts to compensation packages for employees, from benefits to understanding and applying FMLA, from working and negotiating with the IRS and DOL on audits to mergers and acquisitions. I have spent 24 years negotiating deals between adverse parties, finding solutions to complicated problems, and helping stakeholders to consider and determine the best solutions based on data, cost-benefit analysis, and regulatory constraints.

Beyond my career, I’ve served as:

  • Board member at the Music Settlement School

  • Chair of the Governance and Nominating Committee, Executive Committee member, and current Board Member at the Nature Center at Shaker Lakes

  • Member of the Committee for an Elected Mayor

  • Member of Friends to Build CLM in opposition to Cleveland Heights’s Issue 9

  • Past two-term President and current Treasurer for Communion of Saints PTO

I am also a proud parent of Heights High graduate and current Kent State senior, a St. Ignatius School student and scholastic national champion rower, and a Communion of Saints student with an entrepreneurial spirit who is always looking for new clients with yards that need weeding. And I am an active participant and block DJ of “Scareborough” every Halloween, owner of that Browns tailgating bus you see in Cleveland Heights during football season, a member of a book club (frequent attendee, rare book reader), and a sucker for cheesy sports movies.