Hosted by FIGT ANZA
Date and Time:
Thursday 27 October 2022
7.30am GMT, 2.30pm Singapore, 5.30pm Sydney, 7.30pm Auckland
Check your timezone here: https://www.worldtimebuddy.com/
Location: Online (via Zoom)
Cost: FREE. Open to all.
For this special event, FIGT ANZA Australia, and New Zealand is joined by six amazing global mobility authors.
- Louise Ross - Women Who Walk: How 20 women from 16 countries came to live in Portugal & The Winding Road to Portugal: 20 Men from 11 Countries Share Their Stories
- Joyce Agee – The Newcomer’s Dictionary
- Kirsten Pontius - Moving Abroad with Your Health and Sanity
- Mariam Navaid Ottimofiore - This Messy Life
- Rhoda Bangerter - Holding The Fort Abroad
- Carolina Porto - Lar Mundo Afora & Un Hogar Lejos de Casa
They are all active FIGT members and with their work, they bring their unique perspective on topics related to globally mobile life. Their experiences cover both personal and professional aspects of their life across cultures.
Read the authors' bios here.
We would love you to join us.
Register in advance for this meeting.
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.
Louise Ross is a writer, speaker and podcaster originally from Australia. She has lived abroad since the mid '80s, first in the U.K. and France, followed by the United States, where she completed graduate studies in Jungian Psychology. In 2014, she moved to Portugal. She is the former President of the Executive Board of International Women in Portugal (IWP), a social organization with a membership of 400 expatriate and immigrant women. In 2019, she published, Women Who Walk: How 20 women from 16 countries came to live in Portugal. In August 2020 she released the sequel and comparative read, The Winding Road to Portugal: 20 Men from 11 Countries Share Their Stories. And in May 2021, she launched her Podcast, Women Who Walk (inspired by her book of the same name) and where she unpacks the journeys of impressive, intrepid women who’ve made multiple international moves for work, for adventure, for love, for freedom. Click here for her website.
Joyce Agee has worked in the arts and cultural sector as a successful photographer, exhibition curator, project manager and writer in the United Kingdom, Sydney and Melbourne, Australia and the United States. After graduating from university, she moved to London where she became a freelance photographer and curator. Her photographs were published in The New Statesman, The Guardian, Time Out and The British Journal of Photography. With three other women, she curated and exhibited in the highly successful multimedia exhibition Women’s Images of Men at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London (1981), which later toured around the United Kingdom and Ireland. Moving to Sydney, she continued her career as a freelance photographer and worked for various organisations including the Sydney Festival and the Biennale of Sydney. Moving to Melbourne, she curated The Thousand Mile Stare, the first major exhibition of contemporary Victorian photography and met her future husband. She and her family relocated to Seattle, Washington and, in 2015, they returned to live in Melbourne where she became the Senior Curator at Melbourne’s Museum of Chinese Australian History. Her first book, The Newcomer’s Dictionary is an A to Z of words that explore aspects of relocating. “Whether you have moved or are considering a move, this dictionary will help identify and describe the experience of being a newcomer”. Click here for Joyce’s website.
Kirsten Pontius is an Integrative Health Coach and International Wellness Consultant. She specializes in holistic well-being and health for expat, nomadic, and traveling populations. Her work marries international living with behavior and health sciences to support individuals and organizations around the world.
Kirsten is a Member of the International Association for Health Coaches (IAHC) and a certified Integrative Health Coach. She has training in Trauma Informed Practices, Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction, holistic nutrition and health, yoga including prenatal and kids, and behavioral science. She holds a bachelor's degree in communications (from Concordia College, Moorhead, MN USA) and a master’s in nonprofit administration (Metropolitan State University, St Paul, MN USA. Kirsten hails from Minnesota, USA and has lived in Japan, Republic of Georgia, Cambodia, Romania and is currently settling into her new home of Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire (West Africa) with her husband and two young sons. Moving Abroad with your Health and Sanity is a practical guide for expats, nomads and travelers looking for well-being in their adventures.
Mariam Navaid Ottimofiore is a Pakistani-born expat author, writer, researcher and economist. She was born into expat life, joining her parents on their first global expatriate assignment in 1982 in the Kingdom of Bahrain. She grew up bilingually in Manama, New York City and Karachi. To date, Mariam has lived in ten countries as both an expat child and an expat adult: Bahrain, the United States (NY, MA, TX), Pakistan, the United Kingdom, Germany, Denmark, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, Ghana and Portugal. 39 years and four continents later, her life on the move is messy. A 40-foot container, an expat husband from another corner of the world and three children born in three different countries 3,000 miles apart, have added complexity, challenges and many joys to living a multicultural, multilingual and multi-mobile life. She currently lives in Lisbon, Portugal with her German/Italian husband and her German-Pakistani-Italian kids, born in Singapore, Dubai and Lisbon. Passionate about languages and cultures, Mariam speaks fluent Urdu, English, Hindi and German with some Italian, Danish, Arabic and Portuguese on the side. She is the author of This Messy Mobile Life an expat guidebook for multicultural, multilingual and mobile familes. You can follow her writing on her via Social Media and her blog at ‘And Then We Moved To’
Rhoda Bangerter supports expat families where one partner travels a lot for work. She was raised in a multicultural home and is married to a Swiss. They currently live in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Her husband has travelled their whole marriage including two years when he was based in Kabul. She shares her learnings and research in her book Holding the Fort Abroad. Her message is “your challenges are real, don’t face them alone.” Join the Holding the Fort Community on Mighty Networks here: Membership - A Multicultural Life and listen to the Holding the Fort Abroad Podcast Podcast - A Multicultural Life where Rhoda interviews expats who have experience, therapists and researchers and shares her own tools for this life journey.
Carolina Porto is a multi-cultural international transition consultant, a seasoned high mobility expat and an author. She serves international individuals and families through one to one sessions and works with corporations to support their expats. After serving more than a decade several families in global transition, she specialized in supporting latino families going through international transitions and wrote the book Lar Mundo Afora, published in Portuguese and Spanish - Un Hogar Lejos de Casa, directed to the global mobile population. Carolina is a former board member for FIGT and is serving as the co-leader for the FIGT Brazilian Affiliate.
