Sonya was born and raised in Melbourne, Florida, where she grew up playing on the beach and watching Space Shuttles launch into the sky. Her grandmother, Charlet, was Sonya’s first introduction to photography and helped her discover the importance of documenting life. By junior high, Sonya was creating characters and writing stories, drawing inspiration from the people she met and the places she encountered. That curiosity about people and their stories stayed with her, shaping her writing and the way she approaches photography.

After spending her college years and twenties between Nashville and Tampa, Sonya left Florida in 2014, heading west to Portland, Oregon, where towering trees, mountains, and the Pacific Northwest landscape offered an entirely new way of seeing the world. For a time, the Rocky Mountains were also part of her everyday view.

But Mexico changed her the most.

Over five years, Sonya lived in Cabo San Lucas, Playa del Carmen, and Ensenada. Living abroad allowed her to slow down, observe, and become immersed in places rather than just passing through them. The people, architecture, landscapes, and colors she encountered continue to influence her work today.

Although Sonya has spent much of her professional life as a writer, photography has always been a constant. She completed graduate-level coursework in architecture, documentary, and portrait photography, and worked on her thesis titled Under the Sun: Florida’s Modernist Architecture. Both are ways of paying attention - of noticing the details, places, and people that make a moment worth remembering. Whether she's telling a story with words or through an image, she's interested in the same thing: the stories we leave behind.

In 2024, Sonya found her way to the Blue Ridge Mountains and settled in Roanoke, Virginia.