I grew up in a very small town in west Michigan. After two years of community college, I moved to Chicago to attend film school, relocating from a town of about three hundred people to a city of over three million. For my final semester at Columbia College, I made a similar move to Los Angeles when I was selected to participate in their highly competitive "Semester in LA" program. I then lived in the Hollywood area for the next two years, working in multiple facets of the motion picture industry, ranging from production assistant on a popular television show to professional script reader. In 2004, one particular screenplay and the story behind it led me to southern Oregon, where I spent the next year and a half working on virtually every aspect of a low-budget documentary project of my own design, which was later accepted to several prominent film festivals around the US. I then returned to the Midwest, where I attended graduate school, earning an MA in English with an emphasis in Film and Literature from Northern Illinois University in May 2009.
That same year, I was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to live in Eastern Europe for a year, where I filmed and assembled footage for a documentary video about the Republic of Moldova. Upon returning to the US, I worked as an adjunct English instructor at the community college that I had once attended and as a proposal writer for the largest furniture manufacturer in the world. The executive summaries that I wrote on this company's behalf were remarkably similar to academic grant requests, and a majority of these multi-million dollar bids were successful.
Between 2011 and 2012, I worked as a full-time English instructor at the College of Micronesia. During this time, I deferred enrollment to a doctoral program at Bowling Green State University, where I would later work as a Film Studies instructor while earning my PhD in American Culture Studies with a primary concentration in Critical Studies in Media, Film and Culture and a secondary concentration in American Public Policy. I successfully defended my dissertation in December 2016 and officially earned my doctorate in May 2017.
My first book, Film Comedy and the American Dream, is an original, peer-reviewed monograph based on my dissertation that was published by Routledge as part of their "Advances in Film Studies" series. I was interviewed about my work for the New Books Network podcast. In my book, I explore the multifaceted and dynamic relationships between comedy, cinema and culture from the end of the Second World War through the 2016 presidential election.
Since publishing my book/dissertation in 2017, I have written four feature-length screenplays in a variety of genres, as well as six full-length albums (65 songs) of original music on which I play every instrument. Last year, I also completed a polished draft of an original literary novel and began work on another, and prior to the pandemic, I taught 3-4 undergraduate courses per term as an English instructor at a community college in Ohio, while also tutoring students one-on-one in their writing center. I presently teach English and Humanities at a community college in Colorado.
I enjoy writing, playing/recording music, riding my bike, photography, cooking, baking, playing Scrabble, hiking, camping, and traveling/going on adventures. I am very good at working on computers (PCs and Macs, hardware and software) and I am highly adept at using Final Cut Pro, Premiere, Photoshop, Garageband, Logic, Sonar and ProTools, as well as most other audio and video engineering programs.
Whenever I can afford the time, I am constantly expanding my creative portfolio, which presently includes over a dozen feature-length screenplays, ranging from broad comedy to historical biopic and including just about everything in between. I have directed about twenty short films and one feature film, and I have composed, recorded and produced over a hundred songs. I have also written and performed stand-up comedy sets on multiple occasions and in very different venues. I am a creative problem-solver who is hardworking, honest and dedicated to the promotion of a greater good. I am exceptionally proficient at learning how to do new things, and I am constantly challenging myself to do precisely that.
