Visual storytelling workshop facilitator, author/editor, curator, speaker, community organizer and website administrator Erika Berg lives in Seattle. Born into a multiethnic family, Erika grew up straddling diverse cultures. After graduating with a BA in Psychology from University of California, Berkeley, Erika began a career in book publishing. After work, she taught English to refugees. After hearing one too many stories of injustice from her newly resettled students, Erika traded in her 24-year publishing career to volunteer with her then four-year-old daughter in Dharamsala, India, facilitating visual storytelling workshops with Tibetan children who had fled Tibet over the Himalayas. Upon returning to Seattle, Erika began working with and on behalf of refugees full-time. She launched Exiled Voices for Justice (www.exiledvoicesforjustice.org), a series of documentary screenings, panel discussions and advocacy fairs about cultures in conflict. At hours, she facilitated visual storytelling workshops with refugee youth from around the world, including Burma. After facilitating workshops with refugee youth from Burma along the Thai-Burma border (2011) and the India-Burma border (2012), Erika curated an exhibit of refugee youths’ paintings at Seattle Art Museum, which jumpstarted her work on the book Forced to Flee: Visual Stories by Refugee Youth from Burma. In 2013, Erika and her family traveled into Burma and facilitated workshops with interethnic youth groups. Paintings from those workshops are featured in the book’s epilogue, “Bridging Divides.” After completing the book, Erika developed the content for www.burmavisionsforpeace.org, which includes an online version of the book’s “Ways to Help” appendix. Currently, Erika is partnering with ethnically diverse school districts and communities on initiatives designed to increase awareness of the challenges and aspirations of refugees and promote increased civic participation among foreign-born communities. At the same time, she is working with interethnic youth leaders in Burma to engage and amplify the country’s most marginalized and oppressed ethnic minority voices in Burma’s struggle for democracy.