Growing up, Lisa was exposed to art of all kinds from all over the world. As a native of Tucson, Arizona, she was immersed in Southern Arizona's beautiful and unique Sonoran Desert landscape, which profoundly influenced her internal identity and aesthetic. The Sonoran Desert's color and vastness together with a deeply felt resonance with Georgia O’Keeffe’s art, words and life, shaped how she saw and felt the environment around her. In the intense light and clear creosote-scented air, near the sharp-shaped mountains of blues, greens and purples, and under the expansive sky with the spectacularly saturated sunsets, Lisa learned to visualize her surroundings in terms of shapes, colors and compositions. As a result, some of her paintings look like abstracted landscapes.

Her formal visual arts training was primarily through her public fine arts magnet schooling. Encouraged by her parents and grandfather, a painter, Lisa began oil painting lessons at age eight and has been making art ever since. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in Human Biology with a minor in Art History from Stanford University. She has exhibited artwork in the U.S. and internationally. Her art is part of corporate, hotel and hospital collections in the United States and private collections in the United States, Europe, New Zealand and India.