I sometimes joke that I never really chose travel; I inherited it.

I was born in Marrakech into a family of American academics, writers and polyglots where curiosity was less a personality trait and more a way of life. Travel was never framed as luxury or escape. It was education. It was how you learned history, language, perspective and, perhaps most importantly, humility.

A lot of that came from my mother, who quietly lived the kind of life that expands your sense of what is possible. As a teenager, she studied Portuguese in Brazil, Chinese literature in Taiwan and cultural communications in Afghanistan. By her early twenties, she spoke seven languages and moved to Morocco on her own to study Arabic. Watching her, I understood very early that the world was not something to observe from a distance; it was something to participate in.

So there was never really much hope for me.

I grew up between cultures, languages and continents. Before travel became my profession, I was a dancer. Movement was already my first language. Photography came later and gave me another one. Dance taught me movement; photography taught me attention. It slowed me down. It taught me to notice gesture, atmosphere, the space between people, the moments that would otherwise disappear.

Travel eventually became the place where those worlds met.

Over the years I lived and worked across Morocco, Syria, India, Argentina, Spain and the United States. Somewhere in the middle of all of that, I met my husband in a taxi in Beirut , on our way to Damascus, which still sounds slightly fictional when I say it out loud.

My life has always unfolded through people, movement, curiosity and the occasional improbable story. Eventually, it became my work too.