Lena is beginning her 8th year teaching in the arts and her first year at Prep. After receiving her Bachelors degree in Art from Mississippi State in 1979, she worked in several art related fields from ad agencies, architecture firms, to museums and public relations offices. While working at Millsaps as a graphic artist, she received another Bachelors degree in 1995, this one in education. She began teaching art in Madison County in 1996. In 1998 she was nominated to serve on a Praxis validation/standard setting panel for new teacher licensure assessments that had been developed by ETS. In 2000, she took graduate teaching courses at Mississippi College and received an additional area of certification in gifted education and taught gifted for a few years.

Besides teaching, Lena stays busy with her husband, Chuck, their two children, Katherine, age 20, who is a junior at University of Georgia and Charles, age 12, who is a 7th grader at Jackson Prep, and their two dogs.

In her "spare time", she has started experimenting with gardening and is quite intrigued by it. She enjoys reading, especially Mississippi authors and hiking particularly in the mountains and is setting up her easel for future painting projects.

Her grandfather told her when she was a little girl that 1st, it would take a hundreds of years to take all the courses Harvard had to offer and 2nd he told her, and this quote is close but probably not exact, that a wise man is a man that knows he doesn't know everything.