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 actually feel it. But 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 actual practice of inhabiting a character's emotions, motivations, and thoughts — consciously building someone else's reality from the inside out — gave me the ability to do the same thing for real people. That stays with you. It changes how you listen, how you read a room, it lets you hear what someone is actually 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. I was self-taught, but it was the early 2000s — back then you didn't need a certification, you just needed to know how to do things, be curious, and have a willingness 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 process. How to create efficiency without losing the thing that makes the work worth doing. It was good work, and I was good at it, but there was a creative loss underneath that I didn't fully recognize until later. The part of me that had spent nine years learning to feel things on purpose was just... quiet. Not gone, but waiting.

That's where the camera came in. Photography didn't replace what I'd lost, exactly, but the creative self found a new way through. 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 strong desire to capture a truth for others to feel.

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. It's about capturing what's underneath the surface of a moment — the tension that exists between things, the emotion that all of those decisions are actually in service of.

The blue trying to push through the ash and ice of a glacier. The history in someone's eyes. A bird caught between two forces. I didn't know I was shooting for tension until someone pointed out the pattern in my work, and then I looked back and saw it everywhere. That's how it is with the things that are genuinely yours — they show up before you have a name for them.

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. (Nothing could malfunction on camera, everything had to be substantiated. This was not a job for someone who just knew how to use a phone.) Two commercials as a freelance technical producer turned into freelance assistant producer work when the agency needed extra hands and didn't have the staff to cover it. 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 genuinely amazing people, got brought on staff, promoted to associate producer eight months later, and running my first shoot within a year after that.

Fourteen years in this business, and I've accomplished and experienced 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. I'm grateful for all of it (and that's just a few).

The path that landed me on that Verizon set oh so many years ago isn't one I could have ever 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 is why I can look at a $1.4 million offshore production with four simultaneous crews and see the architecture of it clearly, even when everything around me is moving fast. The photographer in me is why I understand instinctively why a shot works — why the lighting feels right, why the mood lands, why the visual story we're trying to tell is actually being told.

It truly was every wrong turn leading to the right destination.