An American girl
who became a global woman.

From a small American town
to the world.

I grew up in the United States with a clear sense that the world was bigger than what was around me — and a quieter sense that I would one day have to go find out.

I trained as a lawyer with a focus on international and technology law because the law was the most portable credential I could earn. A law degree could travel. So could I.

What I didn't expect was that the law would carry me across China, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, and back across the United States — or that I would spend my thirties raising four daughters across three of those countries while building businesses, advising clients, and assembling the global life I had only imagined as a child.

Practicing law across continents.

I am a US-trained international lawyer specializing in export controls, trade compliance, and cross-border commercial frameworks — particularly across the US, China, and the UAE. I currently serve as Managing Director of a UAE-based firm advising defense and AI companies on US–China–UAE risk and compliance.

Before founding my own firm, I held senior counsel roles at Standard Chartered Bank in Singapore and Marriott International in Shanghai. I speak Mandarin. I read regulations across three legal systems. I sit on the right side of conversations where the wrong answer can cost a company a hundred million dollars.

This is the credibility stack underneath everything else I do. It is what makes my work for Black women in business different from a coach's — I have actually done, and continue to do, the technical work I write and speak about.

Why I built She Leads Here.

By my mid-thirties I had built a career across three continents, and I knew with absolute clarity what the rooms looked like for Black women in global business — because I had been the only one in most of them.

I founded She Leads Here in 2025 as a global community for ambitious Black women — a place to find each other, learn from coaches who have done the work, and build the cross-border careers and businesses we are uniquely positioned for.

What I host on the podcast What Black Women Know is the conversational version of that work. What I publish in my LinkedIn newsletter Global by Design is the philosophical version. What I will publish in my first book is the long-form version. All of it points in the same direction: there has never been a better moment to be a Black woman building globally.

An intercultural family in Dubai.

I live in Dubai with my Serbian husband and our four daughters. Ours is an intercultural family — Black American, Serbian, raised between continents and curricula and cultural inheritances.

I write and speak openly about what it means to raise globally-aware children, to navigate an intercultural marriage across continents, and to build a family by design rather than by default.