Kriss was born in a tiny southern town, not far from good ol' Rocky Top, Tennessee, to decidedly Pacific Northwest parents. This has made her speaking accent a bit... indeterminate. Since then, she has lived in Virginia, New York, and Massachusetts, muddling things even more.
She excelled academically throughout her life, and upon graduating high school found herself with a variety of scholarships to choose from. Based on her early interest in video production, and the offered financial aid, she accepted the offer of Hofstra University, where she graduated with her Communication Arts degree summa cum laude.
A bit at loose ends that summer, Kriss had one goal, and that was not to go back to the south. With that in mind, she contacted some online friends in Boston, and rented a room there. After temping for many months, she was hired by MIT's Mechanical Engineering offices, where she had been filling in. Not one to sit stagnant, she used her time there to teach herself simple database design in MS Access, and created her first personal website by hand-coding raw HTML in Emacs. She even took the hard-core undergraduate weed-out course for prospective CS majors, 6.001, where she learned basic data structures, functions, and object oriented coding, in SCHEME. At least things weren't boring!
However, she couldn't stay an office worker forever, and when she was offered a chance to return to her field of media production, she had to take it. She joined the library staff of Emmanuel College as their Media Coordinator, walking in just as a massive staff turnover resulted in almost no institutional memory. No one even seemed sure what her job description was! Kriss assessed her resources, scrutinized old reports and memos, researched similar schools, and built a Media Services department from the ground up. She created a policy and system for equipment logistics, and offered her services as videographer and editor to the campus. For her efforts, she was promoted to Media Director.
The earliest years in Boston consisted of a series of room rentals and sublets with friends, finally ending when she signed a real lease at an apartment rapidly named the House of the Purple Tub, due to her roommate's tendency to dye his hair. When he finally departed for a life of still more excitement in New York City two years later, she became a founding member of the longstanding cooperative household at Pondscumme Manor. The "Scummebags" are still there after seven years, although Kriss fell madly in love with some guy and left to move in with him. The nerve!
Kriss went on to marry the aforementioned guy in May 2005, and still resides in the greater Boston area with her husband and their two cats. They recently purchased their house, which was an adventure in itself.
Still not one to stagnate, she can be found having adventures everywhere from the video crew in the "Control Room" of Fenway Park, to faraway tropical islands (see the Travelogues!). Her interests still range through whatever has caught her fancy lately, from auto repair to nineteenth century European art, with a recent emphasis on home renovation, carpentry, and interior decorating!