Ms. Durante has a background in the performing arts as an opera singer, actor, director, and producer, and in customer service as an administrator, sales associate, copywriter and copyeditor. This combination of experiences and skills have placed her in a unique position of being able to study and assess clients' and customers' expressed and unexpressed needs as both an experience designer and an ambassador for her employers' services. Her goal is to use the science of psychology to broaden and apply her knowledge of human interaction, and improve communications and people-serving systems on both a large and small scale.

In early 2022, during her freshman year at CCNY, she was chosen as a recipient of the Mixner Fellowship for LGBTQ+ advocacy, which led to a six-month internship with the counseling team of the Hetrick-Martin Institute on-site in NYC. At the end of her sophomore year (2023), she was nominated for and accepted into the cohort of the S Jay Levy Fellowship for Future Leaders for the 2023-24 school year. As a result, she spent the summer before her senior year in a second internship, this time with I’RAISE Girls and Boys International as an HR Advisory Intern, reporting directly to that organization’s Director of Human Resources. At the end of the 2022-23 school year she was accepted into the combined BA/MA program at CCNY, and she is on track to be able to graduate with her first Bachelor’s Degree and a Master of Arts in Psychology after a total of four years of study.

Professionally, she has demonstrated her organizational skills and attention to detail by organizing and successfully crowdfunding a theatrical production from the ground up, consulting on a second successful theatrical crowdfunding campaign which raised over $16,000, and designing a comprehensive and intuitive inventory management system for an international luxury business which now has sales of $10-25M per calendar year. She has had extensive experience as both a volunteer staff member and a paid facilitator in LARP (Live Action Role-Play) events in New York City and across the country, and she is interested in exploring how that personalized form of expression (much like immersive theatre, and with many parallels to drama therapy) can be used to facilitate personal development and foster understanding and communication within groups.