Rae was born and raised in Dundalk, a working class port town located outside the city limits of Baltimore. Her backyard was a playground of towering factory stacks puffing chemicals from the local steel mill. She knew beauty in the grandeur of industrial-sized unpacking cranes. At sunset, their metal necks would shine and reflect off the Chesapeake and dissolve into the smoky orange glow of the sky. This is where she first learned that beauty and peril can be one in the same. It was with this revelation she yearned to capture and hold space for the beauty and peril that is life with the hope to learn and love through it all.