I draw from my experiences, successes, and failures tripping upwards through life as a DJ, a radio producer, a music IP professional, a wanderer, a drudge, a man in love, the oldest person in class (by far), an immigrant, a party animal, even a monk.

I grew up surrounded by cows and corn in a farm town between Baltimore and Washington, DC. I was equally at home in the woods, playing video games, watching movies, swimming with my shoes on in the creek, and swiping my brother’s cassettes to blast music. From a young age, I remember writing stories and “sequels” based on video games and comic books. 

Music has always fascinated me. I remember staring wide eyed at the Abraxas jacket while digging through my parents’ records. In high school, I stumbled upon Experience by The Prodigy. Nothing sounded like that. It catalyzed a drive to explore all music and I crossed paths with rave culture. I wrote screenplays using Sasha and Digweed mixes as the score and I would lie to my parents and sneak off to the legendary rave Fever in Baltimore. At nineteen, I spent a semester in London, England, wandering the barren streets of Hackney Wick trying to locate warehouse parties by listening for the thump of bass speakers.  

I bought a set of turntables after returning to the US and I began mashing together any record I could get my hands on. Gorillaz mixed with Steve Martin, mixed with the 2001 soundtrack, The Chemical Brothers, and Pink Floyd – it was weird. Soon after, I moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico and immersed myself in hip hop, drum and bass, and electronic music. 

Around the same time, I discovered books like the Tao Te Ching, the Dhammapada, and the Upanishads.  As I got deeper into the books, I got deeper into the roots of the music and I began to feel a connection that I couldn’t explain. Surely, I thought, there is a link between our integral nature and the creative act.  Something that fosters the growth of communities and social movements evident in the burgeoning rave culture, the music and protests of the Woodstock era, the origins of hip hop, disco…a perennial seed of expression and freedom constantly reasserting itself. I DJed all over the country while trying to define this link. Eventually, it led me to join the Ramakrishna Order in 2010 and live in a monastery in Trabuco Canyon, California for almost two years. 

In 2012, I enrolled at the University of Colorado in Denver to pursue a music degree. There, I realized I had a talent for working in the “business” of music. Shortly after graduating, I moved to Los Angeles and began managing IP rights at Universal Music Group.

During that time, I met the Tastemakers, a group of DJs in LA, and I started sitting in as a co-host during their weekly show on Dash Radio where we celebrated and lampooned DJ culture (and ourselves).  As Tastemakers grew, I developed my own show, The Rewind, which ran for over 30 episodes. In 2020 we launched Tastemakers as a 24/7 station with over 40 programs. Rewind expanded to an entire day of programming, and I onboarded more shows.

In 2021, I sold everything, quit my job, and moved to Italy to pursue a masters degree in the Economics and Management of Arts and Culture from the University of Bologna. I traveled a ton in the cracks and rediscovered my love for writing.

I’ve turned over a lot of rocks throughout my life in a search for meaning and I’ve seen a common story. We live in diverse realities and the world can be a complicated mess.  Despite this, we share a capacity to overcome, to help, to recover, to love, to build, and to even laugh and create beautiful things. I seek to join those who remind us: no matter how much we have been ground down by the world or by our own doing, we have an innate spirit of connection and perseverance.

I’ve moved all over the United States and overseas in search of something just beyond the grasp of my articulation. Today, I can see that these various paths are all threads I’ve had to collect before I had a tailored perspective to weave them together.

So here I am.