Producer wasn't the planned destination. I just looked up one day and realized it was the place every path on my journey had been taking me all along.

Most people find their way into advertising on purpose. I didn't, exactly. Mine was a journey with detours that felt like setbacks at the time, but each one quietly left me with something I didn't know I'd need.

The first destination I had in mind came early. I was going to be an actor (no, really). In fourth grade, I was accepted into a magnet arts program and trained in acting until I graduated high school (an hour and a half every single day, for nine years straight). Not drama club, not school plays on the side — a serious, structured, conservatory-style program that ran alongside my regular education for nearly a decade.

I was taught the fundamentals: character work, motivation, how to find the truth in a moment and make someone feel it. The deeper thing it gave me (the thing I didn't have a name for until much later) was empathy at a level most people don't get trained in. The practice of inhabiting a character's emotions, motivations, and thoughts from the inside gives you the ability to do the same thing for real people. That stays with you. It changes how you listen, how you read a room, how you hear what someone is trying to say when the words aren't quite getting there.

Life gave me my first real detour after high school. Circumstances took the theater program at a well-regarded university off the table, and I ended up in IT. Self-taught, but this was the early 2000s. Back then you didn't need a certification, you just needed to know how to do things, be curious, and be willing to figure it out.

I spent eight years doing enterprise technical support, training new hires, building knowledge bases, writing SOPs. Learning how systems work and how to make them work better. How to document a process. Problem-solving is its own creative work, and it was fulfilling in its own way. But the part of me that had spent nine years learning to feel things on purpose was just... quiet. I missed the outward expression of artistry.

Then I picked up a camera. I'm a creative person by nature, happiest when I'm making art. To me, making art is the process of bringing something internal out into the world for others to share in. The camera gave me a new way of doing that, something I could use to share the feeling of a moment with someone. Once I realized I had a natural eye, I read half a book on photography (just enough to know what the settings did), put it down, and started shooting. No classes, no formal training. Just my intuition, a camera, and a desire to capture the essence of a moment.

I've never been interested in making the most technically perfect picture. It's not about the right f-stop, the correct shutter speed, or the perfect composition. All of those decisions are in service of something else: what's actually alive in a moment, the thing holding itself together inside everything else around it, the emotion underneath it all.

The blue alive inside the ash and ice of a glacier. A gull alone in fog flying above a buoy. A father and son holding hands by the water in Central Park. I've always shot instinctively, never thinking about a common thread or style running through my work. Then, unexpectedly, someone reviewing it pointed one out: presence — what's actually alive in a moment, quiet and vulnerable, holding itself together inside everything else. Once it was pointed out, I could see that thread everywhere.

After eight years in IT, the 2008 recession hit and I was out of work for over two years. In 2011, a close friend who was an executive producer at mcgarrybowen called. They needed someone with a real technology background to handle devices on a Verizon spot. This was a competitive 4G launch against AT&T, with no legal supers like "screen simulated" to fall back on. The phones had to do exactly what was being shown on screen, on location, and everything had to be substantiated. Not a job for someone who just knew how to use a phone.

Two commercials as a freelance technical producer turned into ongoing freelance work as the agency needed help with junior-level producer tasks. I spent two years as a freelance junior producer (which, if you know this industry, is not a thing that exists) learning the ropes from a department of producers who had no ego, were generous with their time, and were actually willing to teach someone who knew nothing. After those two years, I got brought on staff, was promoted to associate producer eight months later, and ran my first shoot within a year after that.

Fourteen years in this business, and I've done things I never imagined I would. A Chevron spot shot next to a furnace running at a thousand degrees Celsius in a steel mill. A United Airlines series that put me on top of a glacier in Iceland. A Canada Dry campaign with fourteen unique setups across nine locations over three very long days. And that's just a few.

The path that landed me on that Verizon set isn't one I could have planned. It created an opportunity that only worked because of everything I'd been carrying with me without knowing I'd need it. The actor in me is why I can walk into a voiceover session and give a performer a character instead of just feeding the copywriter's direction ("can you read it with more gravitas please?"). The systems thinker in me is why I can look at a $1.4 million offshore production with four simultaneous crews and see how the whole thing fits together, even when everything around me is moving fast. The photographer in me is why I understand instinctively when a shot works: why the lighting lands, why the mood holds, why the visual story we're trying to tell is actually being told.

It truly was a journey of every unexpected turn leading to the right destination.