Artist, writer, and photographer, Jill Culiner was born in New York and raised in Toronto. At 17, she began an itinerant life that led back to New York, then on to San Francisco, London, Paris, Amsterdam and small villages in France, England, Germany, Turkey, Hungary and Greece. She has worked delivering newspapers, as a radio announcer, cashier, translator, fortune teller, belly dancer, B-girl, model, and actor. She has crossed much of Europe on foot, and her artwork has been exhibited in cultural centres, galleries and museums throughout Europe as well as in Canada. She began her literary career by writing and telling travel stories on Radio France. Her book Finding Home in the Footsteps of the Jewish Fusgeyers won the Joseph and Faye Tannenbaum Prize for Canadian History in 2005.