Misha Ash was born in the Soviet Union, about 450 kilometers northwest of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant three months after the meltdown. After trying his hand at origami, burning down a log playhouse in his kindergarten's courtyard, and spending a couple summers at his paternal garndparents' dacha in Severodonetsk, roaming the forests with his elder sibling in search of new and interesting bugs and lizards, he would eventually emigrate from Belarus with his nuclear family and maternal grandparents, arriving in Skokie, IL in 1994.
After about a year in Skokie, his father found work at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado, so the nuclear family parted ways with babushka and dedushka and headed off to the Rocky Mountains. Misha's brother, Yuriy Sergeyevich Luzov, is an artist. Yuriy makes excellent pots. You can see some of his work here.
His native language is Russian, his primary language is English, and he hopes to continue expanding his linguistic knowledge to include more mathematics, symbolic logic, and R, as well as linguistics and gesture. After a two-year stint as a percussionist on the music theory and composition track at a community college, he completed his undergraduate degree in philosophy and psychology at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs. He is now pursuing a Masters degree in psychology as a MAPSS student at the University of Chicago, where he is working on the relation between abstract concepts, cognition, and gesture with Dr. Goldin-Meadow and Kensy Cooperrider. Misha hopes to go on to work toward a PhD in cognitive science. He likes words, brains, and Steven Wilson's music.