She is a graduate of Brown University, where she studied Literary Arts. She was a Fulbright Scholar to India in 2008 and 2009, where she learned Urdu and lived in Kolkata, and worked on a project photographing and recording oral histories on the lives of Indian Muslims. During this time she traveled around India, and to Islamabad, Pakistan. She lived in Cairo, Egypt for five months as a student. She was raised Buddhist.