Michelle Audenaert grew up in Houston, Texas in a core family and church family with a love of creativity in the arts and everyday tinkering. She took a gap year after high school to do handiwork jobs before entering Pomona College in Claremont, California. She graduated with a B.A. in Studio Art and spent most of the next year working in the camp kitchen at Campus by the Sea, an InterVarsity retreat.
She then completed the Career Change Year in Architecture at Texas A&M University, before finding her place in the Urban Planning program there and meeting her husband, Neal, in the Graduate Student Christian Fellowship. She graduated with a Masters of Urban Planning with a Certificate in Historic Preservation and worked for the City of Bryan, Texas as an urban planner before their oldest child arrived. She has engaged in urban planning consulting work in the interim and continues to maintain her AICP certificate.
In 2017, her family moved from Texas to Sunnyvale, California for Neal’s work and enjoyed 7 less humid summers there, before they moved to Austin in July 2024. Her family has been on a journey of understanding and working with their own learning modalities, for their 3 children as well as Michelle and Neal. Michelle comes from a family of teachers and is excited to become a Guide at Studio Prep as her youngest son enters the LS-1 pod.