Renata holds a bachelor’s degree in Comparative Literature from SUNY at Stony Brook, NY, and a Master’s Degree from Teacher’s College, Columbia . Post Master’s, she has studied Multicultural and International Education at UMASS, Amherst, MA. Beyond that, Renata has taken been trained through: Wholeness Energetics, Yoga teaching, hospice work, Vipassana meditation, multicultural education, and Social Justice. She has taught at Smith College for 10 years and had taught in an English language learners’ program in the Amherst-Pelham Public Schools for over 25 years while coordinating the same program for five years. She has trained thousands of teachers in the state Massachusetts on how to work with students from other cultures and languages.  She has been walking on her own spiritual path since  the age of 15 and like so many other humans, Renata had to overcome many significant challenges in life and is actively working on overcoming a few more… Deeply fulfilled in her marriage of 40 years (she is married to a son of two brave Holocaust survivors), Renata is a mother to two grown sons (one of whom is profoundly deaf) and one dog. Together with her partner, she is a caregiver to her elderly mother who is a native of Poland, in their house in the woods in Amherst, MA.