Don't get let down if you're starting a little bit later than some people do

So I started kind of making art since I was little. Both of my parents are artists. My mom is an illustrator and my dad's a musician. And so I think I just had art-making in me from a really young age. And I always really liked movement. And from a really young age, I was kind of choreographing dances in my head. So I had that in mind as my career path. And luckily having two artists parents that actually had it in mind that I could be an artist as a career. I think I was really lucky that way, because not a lot of people have that support.

But I think the way that it really took a more out of the box turn for me is I did study dance for two years in university, I was going to be a dance major and kind of take that track of becoming, you know, having a bachelor's degree in dance, then maybe joining a company, and then I ended up leaving school after two years to go on a gap year trip all by myself.

I was backpacking around Europe and taking a lot of classes there. And I actually found the experience I was learning so much more from it from traveling and seeing all of these new places that I was learning more than I had been in college on just on a personal level. So I actually decided to leave school and start, just continue traveling and I somehow ended up in Morocco.

I met another American woman here who used to dance and invited me to do a choreography project with her I was really interested in choreography as an aspect of dance. And kind of the rest just unfolded from there. I'm still in Morocco. It's been six years here. And it's really a very untraditional place to do contemporary dance specifically.

What advice could you give other people who want to move out whether it's to move out of the US or get into a living of dance?

I feel like those are kind of two separate things. I think definitely have savings first, at least a little bit of a base of savings. You know, money is something that people don't always like to talk about, but it's important because you just need something to get started or either a job abroad or something.

I think you just kind of have to go for it and trust your gut with where you want to go. It helps to find somewhere that has cheap living like Morocco. But if you really want to go to Paris you can find what you need to do in Paris. I think there are so many resources online now, too. There's a lot of forums and guides. For example, when I'm traveling to a city that I've never been to before, I'll often actually look on Instagram. if I'm following any dancers already that I've connected with who live in that city I reach out to them and try to meet them for coffee. You can't really be shy when you're moving to a new place. You have to just kind of try to make connections because your experience of living somewhere else is really going to be made by the people you meet there and the connections you make and how that enhances your whole life and work and everything.