About Tony Onorati

1005431_10201475346116340_1191792277_nSomewhere I read that all ‘About Me’ pages need to be written as third person.  I am not sure where I read that, but I decided to write mine as if I was telling you all about me.  Or at least as much as you would ever want to know.

I was born in 1974 in Seattle, Washington.  I spent most of my childhood raised by my mother and grandmother in various suburbs of the Seattle area.  From Bellevue to Kent, to Renton, to Guam and then finally landing in Auburn, Washington.

I spent most of the 1990’s and 2000’s working in the high technology sector for such trailblazers as SPRY, the first consumer Internet product; Microsoft, Amazon.com, CompuServe, MetaInfo, CheckPoint Software Technologies, Eloquent, Genentech and Apple, Inc.  I also moved, a lot.  Seattle, Anchorage, Seattle, Dallas, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, Seattle, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada and finally, I ended up in the great Bay Area.

I landed in the Bay Area on July 7, 2000 and began a very difficult journey upon my arrival.  I have dealt with everything from social acceptance by others because of my “sunny disposition” to redefining who I am and what it is I want to do.

I was gifted with what people call “an eye”.  I have an eye for color, an eye for design and an eye for composition, which would later help me in the realm of photography.

In the time that has passed since my arrival in the Bay Area, I have pursued a number of different career options.  I have been a graphic designer, photographer, web designer, dabbled in industrial design- and even went so far as to follow my dream of becoming a pastry chef.  I attended both the California Culinary Academy in San Francisco and the Culinary Institute of America in Saint Helena, California; the heart of wine country.  It was a quick discovery that as much as I love to bake and to do all the things sweet, I did not want to lose that love by turning it into a full time career.  Today, I make my wonderful creations in my own kitchen.  I also followed the dream of becoming a formally trained photographer and enrolled in California College of the Arts.  This is what sparked everything else that was to come.

Everything, and I mean everything, I had done up to that point in my life, which was the end of 2012, was to prepare me for my next adventure – mixed media art and art glass designs.

I reside in beautiful Oakland California with my husband of nearly 20 years, our two dogs and two cats.