ABOUT CECILIA
A writer-photographer with published work
in over six countries and three continents.
Cecilia has two whorls on her head. A study in a scientific journal states that babies born with two or more whorls on the head had atypical development during their fetal stages. So there must be something about what naysayers in the Philippines say about a child born with two whorls on their head instead of one. They say that such a child,is a wild child, one who is a headache to raise.

Growing up in the Northern Hills of Tarlac, a town in Central Luzon, Philippines; she proved the naysayers right. She frequently climbed up rooftops and tall trees to watch the sunset or look at the stars to the dismay of her mother. She had no fear of the night. One day, she climbed out of bed and went out to run with her dog on a field with overgrown fern on a full moon, joyously oblivious of the snakes that lived there.

She took her red bike everywhere, exploring the rolling hills near where she lived. Here she would stay alone with her 8 year thoughts for hours. She would come home to eat with improbable stories of buried skeletons in abandoned shacks and caves with fairies by dinnertime. Even now she recounts her happiest memories to be things she's seen in nature and the things that spring from her own mind. One such memory is a tree that looked like its flowers were moving. Up close they were actually  hundreds of feeding butterflies. This memory inspired her to get into photography.

At the age of fourteen, she reported having a strange dream to her parents and then began to read the bible from cover to cover. She would be caught in the wee hours of the morning reading books of a spiritual nature with a flashlight inside the bathroom.

It was from then on, that the wild explorations outside was replaced by an internal one. She had phases of obsessive reading on fringe sciences and conspiracy theories while finishing her degree in Fine Arts at the University of the Philippines.

At 18, she came across a book entitled Space Time and Beyond. This book introduced her to the relationship of the Kabbalah and Cosmology. She read the book every night.

In her twenties, despite graduating from Fine Arts, she took a job as a writer for three of the top multinational advertising agencies in a period of ten years. She gravitated towards research-based work involving brain development, pain management and overall health. When she retired from advertising, she studied industrial photography in Paris. As in her childhood, she explored her surroundings once again on her own. This time, it is at the hills of Montmartre by foot. She sat by the Sacre Coeur alone at night to watch the city shimmer from atop the famous hill, thinking her 30 year old thoughts.

When she and her new husband moved to Bangkok, she explored Thailand in 4 x 4 vehicle and a Nikon camera alone. She photographed old temple ruins while her husband worked. She sold her photographs to stock agencies and occasionally lent her services to advertising agencies and travel and commercial magazines such as Goodhousekeeping and Cosmopolitan Magazine. She has done work for Unicef and the Womanity campaign, a movement for female empowerment.

A few years after her first child was born, she and her family moved to Prague and lived in the Old Town Square near the Old New Synagogue. It was here that she gained deeper understanding of Jewish Mysticism.  She explored Europe with her family and became a travel columnist for Prague Post, an English Newspaper in Prague. She wrote about places children would enjoy.  While studying Biblical Hebrew, she revisited Joseph Campbell's work on mythology. The combination of the two bodies of ideas  led her to  and uncover the meaning of ancient symbols. This changed the way she viewed religion and myth.

It is also in Prague that she deepened her practice of yoga and became involved with the cause of the Noahide Organization.

She now lives in Manhattan with her husband and child. She conducts creative workshops and participates in discussions of myth in the Joseph Campbell Foundation Round Table. She is a member of 85 Broads and TEDxEast.