Erin’s passionate connection with the arts began at an early age. As a young girl growing up in Los Angeles, she would often visit art museums, then return home to spend days sequestered in her room with paint and paper, struggling to recreate the images she had seen.
When Erin attended UC Santa Cruz, she adopted the A-frame painting studio in the redwoods as her second home. There, after the other students had departed and the fog had rolled in, she would spend the night immersed in the creative process. Erin knew then that her life’s work, whatever it might be, would find its strength and inspiration in this process. Erin graduated with honors from UC Santa Cruz in 1975 with a degree in Arts, Crafts, and their History. She went on to get a masters degree in 1978 in Expressive Arts Therapies from Lesley College in Cambridge, Massachusetts.