I come from two extremes.

I was born in rural Utah, where diversity mostly meant the cut of beef, and raised in New York City, where getting a full night's sleep feels like a luxury. Money was tight. Space was tighter. Privacy was theoretical. My mother lived with debilitating epilepsy. My father taught public school. There were seven of us in an apartment built for far fewer, and somehow we made it work. In a place like that, stability is not something you inherit. It is something you assemble from whatever scraps are lying around.

I trained at the High School of Performing Arts, then at The Theatre School at DePaul University in Chicago, and later earned my master's degree from Northwestern University's School of Communication. That is where I began thinking about story the way architects think about weight and stress points, studying what holds and what collapses when pressure is applied.

Before focusing on writing, I worked as a union actor in theatre, film, and television and played drums in bands and live productions. Years of standing inside scenes — feeling where a line lands, where a pause does more work than words, where a room full of strangers begins to breathe together — shaped how I write now.

I write pilots, features, and plays about people shaped by the institutions that claimed to protect them — faith, family, marriage, law — and the moment they decide to stop carrying what was never theirs to hold. I am drawn to characters who make bold, sometimes questionable choices because pressure reveals what people are really made of. I tend to write toward fracture, toward the silence just before someone finally says the thing they have been avoiding for years, toward the truth that arrives late and uninvited.

Writing feels less like ambition and more like purpose. It is the one place where chaos can be shaped into clarity.