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I grew up with art. My father\u2019s best friend with a well-known Cuban artist, Luis Martinez Pedro. His work, on our walls; art was a part of our life and I have been making art for as long as I can remember. It was always assumed that I would go to art school and those lessons began when, as a child, I was signed up for Saturday classes at the Philadelphia Art Museum. I was an art major in high school and prepared a portfolio to apply to what was then the Philadelphia Museum College of Art. I was accepted. During those years I also spent one full summer studying at The Penland School of Arts and Crafts.\nIn the late 80s my second husband and I worked together as the collaborative artist Victoria + Dodd. Our work was used for the opening graphics of the Introduction of the Bravo channel and a number of our larger pieces were purchased by the Children\u2019s Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. During that time, however, I became ill with a disease that I was told would be fatal and, while it did not kill me, it did severely cripple my body which has now \u2013 except for my hands \u2013 recovered; my hands remain severely crippled.\nThe disease changed my outlook on working collaboratively and upon terminating my second marriage in 2008 I set out on my own. I began making art again, on my own. In 2009, I remarried and moved to West Virginia, where I had the great good fortune of being able to dedicate myself to my painting and, after all these years, becoming the painter that I had been expected to be.\nMy paintings have been a part of over 20 shows nationally, received a second place award and two honorable mention awards, and are part of the corporate collections of The Children\u2019s Hospital of Philadelphia, Moss Rehabilitation Hospital in Malvern, PA, and the Child Safe Center in Winchester, VA.\nThe series I am currently working on \u2013 Fish Out of Water \u2013 is an extended metaphor for our lives as humans on earth because we are, after all, as an old song once said, \u201cspirits in the material world.