About Me

My career started at Geauga Lake Amusement Park in Aurora, Ohio, as a caricature artist. I worked alongside some of the most talented, interesting people I’ve ever met.I had no idea how much I would learn from them. Different viewpoints. New ways of approaching the easel. Like a caricature, a slight shift in perspective is sometimes all it takes to turn something ordinary into something incredible.

In 2004 I enrolled at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh to study Media Arts and Animation. The caricature stand gave me an edge early on, but it faded fast once I hit tools and technologies I’d never touched. The program was notorious for its dropout rate. The combination of creative expression and technical mastery broke a lot of my classmates. It took the same lesson I’d learned on the boardwalk: a slight change in perspective turns a challenge into a tool. I graduated in 2008, alongside a tight group of 25 students who had all learned the same lesson.

Along the way I interned at Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center, where I encountered the wisdom of the late, great Randy Pausch. I also worked with Bossa Nova Robotics in Pittsburgh, back when they were a scrappy start-up, an early look at what creativity and technology can build together.

For the last 15 years I’ve worked in ed-tech, designing learning experiences for K–12 students. A love of learning, a designer’s eye, and a systems thinker’s instincts made it a natural fit. I had the chance to direct a small game development team and collaborate with instructional designers and educators to build some genuinely great interactive experiences.

Design isn’t just about making things look good. It’s a tool for communication, a way to align goals and drive decisions. A lot of my work is client-facing: strong layouts, appealing graphics, experiences that tell a story. But over the years I’ve learned my most valuable work often happens where the client never looks.

Prototypes. Storyboards. User flows. These become the tools that align a team, or a stakeholder, around a shared vision. Tangible deliverables that outlast a meeting. Something you can point at and say yes, this is it, or no, we need something else. Call it product design, call it UX, call it whatever you want. This behind-the-scenes work is what actually aligns values, guides production, and grounds decisions in evidence instead of opinion.

There’s one thing in life that that remains consistent, and that is change. This new world we’re working in is no different. The industry was shifting long before these new technologies arrived. So like when I was a kid, I’m going to take it apart and see how it ticks. I want to understand how these tools can be used to tell human stories and express human interests.

Who knows what the future has in store, but with a little creativity, and a slight shift in perspective, maybe we can find out together.