When I was in second grade I would parade around the house draped in a bed sheet dancing to “Walk Like an Egyptian,” an 80’s song by the Bangles. It was the same year we learned about ancient Egypt in Social Studies. I was hooked. Mummies, pyramids, hieroglyphs… I was going to be an Egyptologist. In middle school I memorized hieroglyphs, in highschool I reconstructed KV5 to scale. I did whatever I could to work towards a goal that I thought was ultimately unacheivable.
I worked my way through school at Georgia State University and graduated with degrees in Middle East Studies and Anthropology. In the spring of 2002 I attended the American University in Cairo and worked on the Animal Mummies Project with Dr. Salima Ikram. After my undergraduate experience, I took a year off from school to work as an archaeologist while I applied for graduate programs. The following year I attended the University of Memphis and received a degree through the Institute of Egyptian Art and Archaeology. After getting my Masters degree I spent a year managing an art gallery (Li Gallery) and applied to the PhD program in Art History at Emory University. I wanted to attend Emory because I had always admired the Egyptologists here. In fact, when I was in middle school I wrote to Dr. Gay Robins and Dr. Peter Lacovara. So now that I am here, I FINALLY get to do what I love everyday. I enjoy teaching, conducting workshops on how to make the ancient Egyptian material called “faience,” writing, and research. I also spend a lot of time working on my dissertation, which is about images of foreigners in Ancient Egyptian tombs.
