I grew up moving often. By the time I finished high school, I had lived in seven different houses, which meant I became very good, very early, at adapting to new environments and figuring out what a situation required from me.
My father left when I was young, and my mother raised three kids mostly on her own. I say that not because it is the most interesting thing about me, but because it shaped how I learned to move through the world. I understood early that stability was not always something you inherited. Sometimes, it was something you had to build.
That instinct followed me into almost every organization I've been part of since. I tend to notice what is missing, where the structure is weak, and what needs to exist for people to do better work. I've never been especially comfortable waiting for perfect conditions before starting something – partly because I didn't grow up with the assumption that perfect conditions were coming.
Emory became an important part of that story. It wasn't just a place where I earned a degree; it was where I started to understand the kind of work I wanted to do and the kinds of rooms I wanted to be in. It helped me take instincts I already had – curiosity, adaptability, ambition, and a need to make sense of complexity – and turn them into something more directed.
When I entered college, I was pre-med. For a while, I genuinely thought I wanted to become a neurosurgeon, which makes sense to me in retrospect. I've always been interested in how people work: why they make decisions, what motivates them, what changes their behavior, and what makes certain things stay with them.
Eventually, though, I realized that my interest was less about practicing medicine and more about understanding people. Marketing became the more honest version of that curiosity. It allowed me to study people, culture, decision-making, and behavior in a way that felt both strategic and creative.
I also think marketing is more analytical than people sometimes give it credit for. At its best, it is built around hypotheses, testing, measurement, iteration, and judgment. You're constantly trying to understand not only what people respond to, but why they respond to it. That combination of creativity and structure is what made the field click for me.
Entertainment added another layer to that understanding. Through my work at Blumhouse and Tomorrow Studios, I saw how stories are developed, evaluated, positioned, and moved through systems. I learned that creative work is not just about having a good idea. It is also about understanding audience, timing, infrastructure, relationships, and execution.
That instinct has carried into everything else I have done. It showed up in brand work at Krispy Kreme. It shows up in how I think about CRM, audience strategy, and organizational systems. It shows up in the way I approach leadership. Even when the industries have changed, the underlying question has usually stayed the same: what makes people care, and what has to be built for the work to actually last?
“You have a way of making complicated things understandable without losing what matters.”
My career doesn't fit perfectly into one category, which used to make me feel like I needed to over-explain. I don't really feel that way anymore.
Blumhouse Productions
I worked on a post-production archive that needed real structure: nearly 400 sources of physical and digital inventory, inconsistent metadata, and physical drives that created obvious long-term risk. I helped build the framework to fix it. I researched cloud storage solutions for more than 500 terabytes of content, modeled cost and retrieval structures, and presented a recommendation that leadership adopted. I was an intern, but the work still mattered, and I treated it that way.
Tomorrow Studios
I pitched original television and feature concepts directly to executives, including ARGIVES, a prestige drama drawn from The Iliad, and HIS SON, a domestic psychological thriller reframed around the wife the original story forgot about. I wrote script coverage, sat in on agency meetings with CAA, UTA, and WME, and learned how quickly a project can either gain momentum or lose it. Sometimes the idea is strong, but the positioning is not. Sometimes the creative case and the business case are not speaking to each other. I became interested in that space.
Krispy Kreme
I supported global campaign execution across more than 18,000 points of access, wrote SEO copy for seasonal LTO launches, and built competitive analysis and brand resilience work that shaped internal strategy conversations around Gen Z and economic volatility. The part I enjoyed most was sitting at the intersection of the creative brief and the business case – making sure the idea was not only interesting, but sound, timely, and actionable.
Spectrum Reach
I manage post-sale fulfillment across roughly 1,000 to 1,500 ad units weekly, help protect more than $114K in weekly revenue at risk, and have learned what it actually means to execute under pressure in a system that doesn't really pause. It's not the most glamorous work I have done, but it has made me sharper at prioritization, triage, communication, and staying calm when the deadline is real.
NAIGC Board
As a Board Member for the National Association of Intercollegiate Gymnastics Clubs, I help govern a national nonprofit with more than 2,200 members and over $800K in annual revenue. My work touches CRM implementation, financial stewardship, board operations, and multi-year growth strategy for the governing body of collegiate club and adult gymnastics. It's a reminder that leadership is not just about having ideas. Often, it's about building the systems that allow other people to contribute more effectively.
The throughline is clearer to me now: I'm usually working somewhere between creative strategy, operational structure, and audience understanding.
I like translating ambiguity into something people can act on. And I like work that requires both the idea and the system behind it.
The long-term answer is entertainment. I want to produce, and eventually I want to help lead a company with a clear creative point of view and the infrastructure to execute it well.
That goal is not only about wanting to tell stories. It's also about wanting to understand how stories move through the world. The best producers and studio leaders are not only creatives. They understand audiences, distribution, brand, data, operations, and timing. They know how to hold the story and the business in their head at the same time.
That's the kind of leader I am trying to become.
The immediate answer is marketing, specifically brand and product marketing at the intersection of technology, entertainment, and culture. I see that path as connected to my long-term goals, not separate from them. It gives me a stronger foundation in consumer behavior, audience strategy, positioning, and growth – all of which matter deeply in entertainment.
I'm interested in work that asks real questions about people: what they value, what they return to, what they ignore, what they share, and what makes something feel worth their attention. I'm also interested in the systems behind those answers: the research, infrastructure, operations, and strategy that turn insight into something useful.
I don't see this as a detour. I see it as preparation.
A few things that stay consistent regardless of the context:
I build for the person who comes after me.
Every organization I've led has been more structured when I left than when I arrived: a 50-page gymnastics SOP, a reformed Club Sports constitution, and a BLACKSTAR* budget system that actually balanced. I'm not especially interested in being the irreplaceable one. I'm more interested in building things that can run, grow, and improve without me.
I translate.
Between the creative brief and the database. Between the development executive and the post-production coordinator. Between the data and the person who needs to act on it. Most organizational breakdowns are not failures of intelligence – they're failures of translation. I take that gap seriously.
I absorb fast.
Bakery → Blumhouse → Krispy Kreme → ad inventory optimization → nonprofit governance. Different industries, different stakes, different languages. The pattern has been consistent: I get up to speed quickly, learn what matters, and start contributing before most people expect me to.
I care about what I make.
Not preciously. I'm not overly protective of my ideas. But I will push back on a brief if I think there is a better question underneath it. I'll ask why we are doing this before how we are doing this. I find that question tends to save time downstream.
I'm originally from North Carolina, and my perspective has been shaped by Emory, Sydney, Los Angeles, Bali, Mexico, and a childhood that moved often enough to make me adaptable – including a few early years at SABIS® International Charter School.
More than anything, I'm interested in work with real stakes: creative stakes, strategic stakes, organizational stakes, or cultural stakes. I want to help build things that are thoughtful, durable, and worth people’s attention.
If that's the kind of work you're building, let’s talk.