Profiles for October, 2018

Born in Rota, Spain and raised (mostly) in Oslo, Norway, Sylvia moved with her father, a devout capitalist who worked in shipping and investing, her mother, a stay-at-home mom, and her brother, who was into engineering and cars, to the U.S. at the age of 13. Within three years, she managed to get herself kicked out of several boarding schools and into the more important role (at the time) of traveling Deadhead—traipsing across the country on the heels of the Grateful Dead. Always into music, art, and space as a child and knowing that someday she wanted to do something that’d make a difference (to others, to the planet), she knew she’d end up having an impact at some point, she just wasn’t sure how. By the time she reached her late 20s, the how became clearer. Although she’d studied goldsmith-ing at the Rochester Institute of Technology and later earned her BA in anthropology and her BFA in art history from the University of Colorado, these were more avocations than life call-ings.