The most formative circumstance of Kristine Schramer’s childhood was the fact that her father’s military career required his family to relocate approximately every two years. Consequently, while her birthplace is a Navy base in Port Hueneme, California, she has never felt that any one place is her true “home”. Her father’s multiple tours of duty in Italy allowed Kris to travel extensively in Europe, exposing her to great art and diverse languages and cultures from a very young age, while at the same time removing her from the influence of American culture during the late 70’s and early 80’s. (To this day, she is likely to respond with a blank look to references to old cartoons, TV shows, music videos, and Star Wars movies.) She attended the College of William & Mary in Virginia as a Monroe Scholar, taking her B.A. in Fine Art even though she had originally intended to become a veterinarian or biologist. During the summer following her junior year, she studied representational drawing and painting in France, at the Ecole Albert Defois. After graduating from William & Mary in 1994, she moved to New York City, where she worked as a veterinary receptionist and studied figure drawing, painting, and artistic anatomy at the New York Academy of Art and the Art Students League of New York, drew from the life model at the Spring Studio, and visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art almost weekly. From 1995 to 2001 she lived in Bloomington, Indiana, where she earned her MFA in Painting from Indiana University (1998) while working as a veterinary technician and attending a lot of excellent opera. Around this time, her life’s ambition to promote international education was formed, and she began studying the Italian language and pursuing study-abroad opportunities in earnest. In the summer of 1996, with the assistance of a grant from the Institute of International Education, she studied art in Florence, Italy, and the following summer returned to teach there. In 2000 she received a painting award from the National Society of Arts and Letters, which she used to travel and work in Poland. In 2003 and 2005 she received grants to study and paint in southern Italy; also in 2005, she was a finalist for a Fulbright junior research grant in Italy. In 2006 she taught painting and drawing in a study abroad program on the Italian island of Sardinia, where she became a passionate scooterista. From 2001-2013, Kristine Schramer was an Assistant, then Associate Professor of Fine Art at the Columbus College of Art and Design in Columbus, Ohio, where she taught painting, drawing, and artistic anatomy. In 2013 she finally scored her dream job as Associate Director of the University of Georgia’s international residence center in Cortona, Italy, where she now lives full-time with her husband Mark Taggart. She still does not watch television.