Alison Steinbach has long been interested in China and was part of the group that helped document and deconstruct the farmhouse from Cizhong in the summer of 2017. Prior to that, she spent a semester after high school as a teaching assistant with the China Fieldwork Semester in Yunnan. Alison graduated from Sidwell Friends in 2014 and from Harvard College in 2019, with a major in Social Studies (focusing on modern China), a minor in English and a language citation in Mandarin. Since mid-2019, she has worked as a reporter for The Arizona Republic newspaper in Phoenix.