Biography

I was born on October 2, 1990 in a small village called Lith (also called Village near the Riverside). I grew up with 3 brothers and 2 sisters and my mom and dad.
My family has always been very artistic, my mom makes ceramics and directs theatrical performances, while my dad works with wood, makes art of discarded objects, makes paintings and shares his knowledge with others (apart from this they do a lot more, but I think it's hard to describe it all).
We also have an art gallery, quite small, but it suffices.
So I was raised with art. I was used to having no doorbell and lots of people that would come over the treshold to look at our exhibitions. Due to my mothers theatrical background I would also often go to theatres with her and I saw a lot of performances when I was little.

During secondary school I was drawing a lot, but I never could think of myself as an artist. I was just a teenage girl, and I could only think of the negative outcomes of becoming an artist. I was raised in an artistic family and knew all too well that we didn't have a lot of money, and I just wanted to have a good job later in life, live in certainty and I didn't want to be unsure about my income.
Until sixth grade I thought I was going to study psychology.

That was until I watched the making of Tarzan. This is going to sound really cliché, but it did happen like this. I obviously watched Tarzan a lot of times before but I never made the time to watch the making of. So here I was sitting on the couch, just before dinner, watching the making of. I saw how they went abroad to study the landscape in which it should have to take place, they studied the monkeys, they researched, drew from what they saw. They took all their references back home, all their adventures and memories and started building a story. All these drawings on the wall, describing storyboards, sharing ideas.
And that was a time where I was thinking a lot about what I should do later in life, and somehow something just popped into my head. What if I could bring my drawings to life... I never thought about it like that before and it never occured to me that I was actually really happy with how I was raised and maybe it was only good that we didn't always have enough money, my parents did what they loved and why wouldn't I? Why wouldn't I want to make a living out of the things that I liked to do best. And dinner was ready and mom came into the living room and I remember saying to her, 'I could also study to become an animator?"

And so my mom was able to tell me that there was a school called St. Joost in Breda where you could chose a bachelor Animation and I went to take a look with my dad at one of the open door days, and I was selled..
At the age of 18 (after 7 years of VWO) I left Lith, and went to live in Breda studying animation at the acadamy of fine art and design AKV St. Joost.
So that is where we are today and obviously there happened a lot more in my life, but those are other stories and hopefully I can someday use those as inspiration for my animations.