a piece of my story

I grew up with a passion for bringing people together. From organizing recess as a kid to managing nightlife venues before I could drink, my excitement was always in finding better places, better systems, and better technologies for repeating shared experiences. I walked on the edge of culture, technology, and entertainment, learning coordination before I had words for it.

I studied communication, marketing, and anthropology at University of Iowa under one of the worlds leading minds in social sciences. I then began my career in Chicago, in the worlds of live events, venue operations, and short-form media. Chicago’s pulse became my classroom. I learned how rhythm, structure, and human chemistry could turn a crowd into a community. For a while, that was enough. But the world was accelerating, and I wanted to keep pace with what was emerging just beyond the edges of what was popular.

I dove deeper into social sciences and storytelling, studying how culture evolves through narrative and repeated experience. I learned new tools, followed trends, and doubled down on design thinking as a method for navigating complexity. To me, design wasn’t about aesthetics, it was about architecture: how ideas become systems, and systems become worlds.

Throughout my twenties, I traveled across festivals, start-ups, villages, and companies. I worked with communities of impact and got involved in their missions, from sustainability labs, technology startups, live entertainment productions, and humanitarian ventures. I watched projects grow from sketches into livelihoods. I watched people rediscover purpose. I met friends of all kinds and fell in love often. My rolodex grew and I stayed in touch, constantly weaving a network of collaborators that, to this day, continue to change each other’s lives.

By 2014, I could feel the pulse of something forming - an early economy around shared experience and immersive entertainment. Simultaneously, social platforms, coordination tools, spatial computing, AI, and other exponential technologies were coming online. It was the new wild west, and I was right in the middle of it, sharing rooms and adventures with some of the biggest industry titans of our time.

From 2016 to 2020, I co-created two companies focused on merging the worlds of experience, media, and technology. I wanted to help people feel connected again. In our small corner, we called it fighting the loneliness epidemic, well before the term had hit mainstream media. It was clear that every screen and algorithm was fragmenting a shared sense of the world. I chose to go off social media in 2018 and still avoid the feeds to this day. We wanted to design quality first antidotes using participatory systems that rebuilt connection.

Then in 2020, like so many others, I watched as a pandemic slammed into the side of our ship. Overnight, the live experience, media, and hospitality industries collapsed. Half my friends, including myself, lost our companies and our work. The noise stopped, and the silence was deafening.

But inside that pause, something else began to grow. I started hearing from friends and collaborators all over the world who were quietly developing new systems for coordination and interoperability between locations, communities, technologies, and art. I saw a generation of builders choosing to reconstruct the social fabric differently this time. It felt more intentional, more humane, and more local.

In the years that followed, I have slowly resurfaced. I led large teams through complex projects in live entertainment, venue operations, and technology product development. I discovered work that demanded precision, empathy, and endurance. I found that my real craft wasn’t just producing or designing; it was leading people through the chaos of creation, building the systems that make big visions possible.

Since then, I’ve helped creative teams and organizations build productions that transform behavior, spark collaboration, and remind people what it means to belong. I’ve seen engineers learn to dream again, artists learn to collaborate, and communities learn to deal with complexity without losing their soul.

These are my first public words since 2019, and they come from a steadier place. The water’s calmer now, but the current’s still alive beneath it. I’m surrounded by extraordinary allies, including technologists, producers, scientists, and artists, all quietly working toward a shared horizon.

Consider this the raise of my flag, ready to get back on the water. I believe it starts local, and that we each carry a piece of what’s next. I’m here to keep building the systems that let us find one another and I am excited to play a part in the story of whats coming next.