Dana studied music, English, and screenwriting at Chapman University. She achieved her Associate of Applied Arts in Audio Production at the Art Institute of Seattle in 1999, where she also took her first Adobe Photoshop class. After graduating, she worked at Amazon.com, where she regularly exchanged poetry and lyrics with her best friend while helping to maintain the special orders database. Around that time, Dana joined a band and was the lead singer and lyricist. Having journaled since the age of fourteen, Dana has always enjoyed writing. Poetry was one of her last classes at the University of Washington, Tacoma, before graduating in 2009. Of her forty years, Dana spent thirty-two in the Puget Sound area of Washington State, four in California, and four on Maui. She feels so blessed to have lived in so many gorgeous places and have discovered so much about humanity along her journey. Her ideas stem from her many unique experiences with friends, professors, coworkers and employers, and in the values of love and compassion taught by her family. Equally, her interest in sociology, psychology, philosophy, and spirituality led Dana directly to her enjoyment of many books that transformed her thinking along the way.