She earned her B.A. and M.A. in speech communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and her Ph.D. in speech communication with an emphasis in performance studies from Louisiana State University. She has written a book titled AIDS, Social Change and Theatre: Performance as Protest, several articles and has presented numerous conference papers. Her professional passion is using performance as a means of social change, and her most recent area of interest is directing and performing texts about domestic abuse. When she is not teaching and advising students, she does theatre in the Charlotte community and spends time with her two amazing children.