13/04/2026
TwS Writer profile: Meet Teresa Otto.
Teresa Otto's first solo international trip was, by her own admission, a short drive from Montana to Banff. She was seventeen. It was enough.
That early taste of crossing a border into the spectacularly beautiful Canadian Rockies lit something that a distinguished career as a paediatric anaesthesiologist never quite extinguished. If anything, retirement turned the flame up considerably. These days, Teresa's friends joke that she's never fully unpacked. Given that her travels have ranged from a 21-day Trans-Siberian Railroad odyssey to chasing wildflower season across the Texas Hill Country, they're probably right.
As a photographer, Teresa has a gift for finding dignity in things the world is quietly forgetting. Her images of Montana's vanishing wooden grain elevators, those weathered prairie giants, fading from the skyline one by one, are a case in point: atmospheric, elegiac, and shot with the eye of someone who understands that a disappearing thing is worth looking at carefully before it's gone. Read the piece here:
https://travelwithspirit.media/montanas-disappearing-skyline/
Now based in Houston, she works as a freelance writer and photographer, and in a detail that tells you a great deal about her appetite for the unexpected, she curls. Competitively. (Yes, Houston has a curling club. Teresa would like you to know this.)
Back home between adventures, her time is largely managed by two rescued cats, for whom she serves as full-time waitress and housekeeper. They have yet to leave a tip.
