BERNE — Simona Bortis-Schultz is no stranger to change.

After being flung from Romania to the United States at 8 years old, she’s lived coast-to-coast in cities like Los Angeles, Phoenix, and New York before settling in the Hilltowns with her family. In that time she’s been an art director and designer and illustrator, winning awards for her work in the commercial arts.

And she just quit her latest full-time job to devote time to freelancing and her own work.

Through the flux, art has been a constant. Like a lot of kids, Bortis-Schultz found the ability to create worlds in her drawings comforting.

“Art was a way to cope with changes growing up,” she said. “Art class was always my happy place — a place where I felt at home.”

She was the daughter of two engineers who worked in the day to pay the bills and fostered their creative interests on the side: Her mom painted and her father played music. They left Romania for Los Angeles in the 1980s to escape the communist dictatorship that ruled their daily lives.

“There was no personal freedom of any kind,” Bortis-Schultz recounted. “You couldn’t move without the government being OK with it; you couldn’t drive on certain days if the government wasn’t OK with it.”

In the face of food shortages, her family bought bread with a punch-card that limited the stock they could bring home with them each week. Friends and neighbors tipped each other off when a rare item, like salami, was heard to be coming to a certain store, and people would line up before the sun rose to get it before it was gone.

Her family had relatives in Los Angeles who sponsored their immigration, but the area was too expensive so they moved to Phoenix, Arizona once her father got a job there. Compared to Romania, Arizona was, in a word, “different.” Instead of old, historic buildings huddled together in the cold Eastern-European climate, Bortis-Schultz spent her adolescence among bungalows and desert.

To learn the new language, she took English-as-a-Second-Language classes with hispanic children. But because she was white, “Nobody could understand why.” It was here that art class became a haven.

“I was very quiet. I couldn’t pronounce things correctly,” she said. “In art class, I didn’t have to speak — I could just make things.”

She went on to the University of Oregon as a double-major in advertising and visual design. For a moment, she considered photojournalism, but advertising wound up being a better fit. She moved to New York City and worked with award-winning advertising firms there before coming upstate.

To hear Bortis-Schultz describe advertising as “giving the gift of an experience” makes it sound appealing to even the most anti-commercial artists, though she acknowledges there’s variation in creative freedom among clients. And of course, she adds, “Hopefully that experience reflects well on the product.”

In some cases, her personal art fit a marketing vision. For Beekman 1802, where Bortis-Schultz served as Senior Visual Director, she employed a striking, minimalist illustration of “multi ethnic ladies” she had made in her own time in an email campaign for the company’s goat-milk-based beauty products.

Now, though, she’s focused on self-employment and creating art for her own interests, without parameters. Through another Hilltown artist, Bortis-Schultz was introduced to the Friends of Berne Library Art program where her latest illustration work will be displayed throughout the month of October, starting this Friday.

“It’s going to feature women,” she says. “It’s … a visual storytelling.”