1985 to 2003
Born in Luxembourg, raised in Tuntange. At the European School I took my final exams in Dutch, English and French, which left me with a lasting habit: translating between worlds.
Spanish I learned at school too, though not all the way to the exams. Slovak is a work in progress.
2003 to 2011
At eighteen I moved to the Netherlands to study biology at Wageningen University. A bachelor’s with a minor in applied philosophy, then a master’s in ecology with a minor in education and communication.
2007 to 2010
Droevendaal, the student village of stone “barracks” and chickens on the edge of Wageningen, has its own festival: Droeffest. That is where I learned to run things: in 2007 I coordinated the stage and the programming, in 2008 and 2009 I led the whole festival with a core group of eight and about a hundred volunteers, and in 2010 I came back to help. It was a lot of fun.
Two theses
In Peru I measured how guano from seabirds feeds the dry forest along the coast. In the Netherlands I listened to how people experience nature on a deeper, sometimes spiritual level. Both studies, and what came after, are on the research page.
2011 to 2016: case study editor for the Sacred Natural Sites Initiative and the IUCN specialist group CSVPA, on nature conservation with indigenous peoples.
2012 to 2016
An all-round role in Recycle Valley, a litter campaign with Stadsdeel Nieuw-West: social media, research, and teaching primary school kids. Then policy research for the European Green Surge consortium, co-authoring two reports on how cities govern their green spaces.
Also 2012: infographics editor for Food for the City (NAi publishers).
2016 to 2020
At DTG (once the Yellow Pages) and later Youvia, I started as SEO copywriter for SME clients and grew into online marketeer: rebranding the customer communication, newsletter flows and client letters in crisis time, blogs, social and video production.
On the side: co-author of The First Guide to Nature Inclusive Design (Nextcity, 2019), freelance journalism for Krant van de Aarde, and pages for the Filosofie Magazine Levenskunstkalender 2020 and 2021.
2021 to 2026, The School of Life Amsterdam
I grew from content marketer into a systems marketer with a focus on data: search advertising, HubSpot as super admin, the dashboards that showed what sold, and later the team’s adoption of AI tools, with the governance to go with it.
The School of Life is a company that takes its own lessons seriously. I took the courses Emotional Intelligence, Communication and Informal Leadership, and crash courses in film, African philosophy and Psychology in a Nutshell. In team sessions we worked through the same questions together, and got to know each other.
What that work looked like is on the Work page.
To the next chapter.
Street and portrait work in available light, and short experimental films, nine of which were screened at Cavia in Amsterdam.
My English blog since 2012: more than 250 stories, interviews and columns about nature and how tangled up in it we are.
Team captain of Caissa 7 in the Amsterdam SGA competition.
Pages I build for fun: a flight from the Sun to Pluto, a live Earth for the desktop, and the tiled journey on this page.
About search and CRM, data and AI governance, writing, or an idea that needs testing.