Seminarian

Dana has spent much of her life working in education, teaching and leading nonprofits whose focus was educational in nature. Her career began in la Universidad de Guadalajara where she taught English as a Second Language and started the first preschool program. Dana developed a social sciences curriculum for and taught in the bilingual high school at the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores. 

Upon returning to the U.S., Dana earned a Master of Public Management from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh while managing the Western Pennsylvania Family Center, a nonprofit educational resource for mental health professionals and families. Dana served for a decade as the first Executive Director of Universal Learning Centre, a nonprofit she and her husband founded to build libraries in Haiti, her husband’s native land. Under her leadership, the organization received 43,000 books and opened three libraries in Haiti.

In 2014, Dana was asked to start a new outreach program at St. Andrew's Episcopal Church in McKinney, Texas. The program developed into the Hands & Feet Social Transformation Ministry which grew under her leadership to over 900 volunteers who served over 4,500 hours each year in the local mission field. She also founded and led the BlessMobile, a mobile kitchen serving food to those in need. It was at St. Andrew’s that Dana began to sense God calling her to Holy Orders.

In 2019, Dana accepted a position as Director of Youth Ministries at the Episcopal Church of the Transfiguration in Dallas, Texas where she built the youth program back up from a drop in participation. She continued to grow the group during the COVID19 pandemic as a “Virtual” youth group, ministering to the youth and their families throughout the crisis. While serving at Transfiguration, Dana went through a formal discernment period and is now being sponsored as a postulant to the priesthood in the Diocese of Texas.

Dana is currently in her second year at Virginia Theological Seminary and holds, in addition to a master's degree in public management, a B.S. in Sociology/Anthropology and a B.A. in Spanish, from Guilford College in North Carolina. She speaks English and Spanish fluently, and French and Haitian Creole conversationally. Dana and her husband have three adult children and reside in Dallas, Texas.