Lise

I enjoyed an idyllic childhood in Michigan, 4th of five kids, on an island across the river from Canada, south of Detroit. At 10, I spent a year in Malaysia with my family while my physician father ran the local hospital. At 13, I boarded at a high school associated with the National Ballet company of Wash. D.C. that combined academics with professional ballet training. At 17, I auditioned for and won a scholarship to finish ballet training with the Stuttgart Ballet – but didn’t go. At 18, began studies at Stanford University, majoring in Psychology, then Communication, focusing on filmmaking.

My subsequent careers included 20-odd years as an independent documentary filmmaker, as well as stints as:

• The associate producer of The Learning Company’s Totally MAD, the complete CD-ROM anthology of the magazine
• The content editor for an astrology website (where I found myself making up horoscopes)
• And finally, the children’s librarian and manager of one of the branches of the San Francisco Public Library

I retired from the Library in 2017 and moved to Durham - and am thrilled to join the Bull City Commons. Along the way, I married, lived in Paris for a couple of years, and raised two children as a single mom. I enjoy reading, writing, watching movies, biking, cooking, re-learning how to edit videos on computers, and spending as much time as possible with friends and my extended family – most especially, with my two grown-up kids, Tess and Thomas.