Cassandra aka Cassi Zin believes everyone is an artist, just some of us are practicing artists. Her parents were part-time artists. 

 Her dad sketched and painted and her mom made jewelry and sometimes did acrylic painting in her spare time. 

She began her interest in the arts at an early age. Her parents found that she would draw on whatever small pieces of paper she could find, restaurant napkins, matchbooks, business cards.
She took photography and painting in high school and encouraged by her parents she and her sister attended the Academy of Arts in San Francisco, a program that allowed high school students to attend in the summer. There she continued her study of photography and oil painting.
In her final year of highschool she took a creative writing class that inspired her to continue writing as a career. At this time she got a short monologue published in the town paper where she worked as a courtesy clerk at a grocery store.
In college she attended Santa Rosa JC where she focused on creative writing and went to live in a Paris France through a study abroad program studying the writers of the 1920’s. Not only did she study writing but everyday the class went to a different museum to study the painters of that time.
When she returned from Paris she transferred to a college where she thought she would continue her writing studies but she magnetized more to the studies of ecological living and ecological farming. As she studied ecology and sustainability she continued to write and when she went to live in Puerto Rico she wrote poetry and studied the writers of the Carribean as well as studying the ecological issues of the area in which that she found were prevalent around the world.

From there she had many jobs teaching children gardening and ecological exploration through outdoor education. When she moved to Colorado she found a poetry group called Wild Word. She performed her poetry on stage with ten other poets. They also published two poetry collections during that time called Wild Word.

After Colorado she moved back to California to focus on Sustainable living where she attended a program for A Masters Degree and learned about natural building.
She immediately resonated with this medium as an art. She had done some ceramics before but she liked this idea of working with the clay in buildings, benches and outdoor ovens. Clay building allowed her to sculpt in a more free form without fire.
She has taught many clay oven workshops and clay plaster workshops as well as integrating the lessons of sculpting with clay.
Recently she has self published a poetry collection of thirty years of poetry and she is currently working on a creative nonfiction. As a member of Purple Raven Farm she looks forward to teaching opportunities to teach adult and children how to build and sculpt with natural building materials, as clay, sand and straw.