ABOUT

Since 2010 I've worked almost every job in entertainment — journalist, producer, staff writer, creative director — and the whole time I've been after the same question: why people engage with what they engage with, and what makes a piece of content travel on its own.

I'm currently a Creative Director at Illumination, working across the Minions and Super Mario Bros. franchises and the animated slate coming next. I got here by coming up through every layer underneath it.

It started in high school, freelancing as a hip-hop journalist while writing and directing short films. In college, I edited the Arts & Life desk at the FSView. From there, I became West Coast editor of HotNewHipHop the year it was first nominated for a BET Hip Hop Award for Best Hip-Hop Platform.

Out of college, I worked at Omaze, where I produced and wrote digital content that reached YouTube's homepage top ten nearly a dozen times, before moving on to NBCUniversal to write digital content for America's Got Talent, The Voice, This Is Us, and One Chicago. At SoulPancake — Participant Media's digital arm — I worked as a creative writer before the team folded into Participant proper. Then Illumination.

Journalism, directing, production, brand work: the constant underneath all of it has been digital media — the mechanics of attention, engagement, and what actually makes something spread.

That obsession now lives in The Pull, a newsletter that takes apart the systems running media and culture — on the premise that the official story is never the whole mechanism.

Selected recognition: two Clio Awards · Daytime Emmy nomination · Shorty Award · Webby nominations · Fast Company.