Growing up in the damp and rainy Pacific Northwest, there was plenty of time to stay inside and draw. Starting at age 2, this was mostly what I did. I discovered my love of animation when I was about 10, specifically when "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" came out. I knew whatever that was, I wanted to do it for the rest of my life. I started making flip books and devoured any book about animation I could get my hands on. At 17, I applied to and was rejected by CalArts. Nonetheless, I was able to get my first animation job the summer after high school at a small studio in Portland called Media Workshop, making educational CD-ROMs . This allowed me to develop a reel of professional work.

 

Over the next 15 years, commercial animation took me to places like Vancouver BC, New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Try as I might, I struggled to get a response from the big studios. It finally dawned on me that having not gone to animation school, I had missed a crucial step in getting noticed by feature studios: directing a short. In 2006 I partnered with Titmouse to write, direct, and animate ‘Pinched’, a nearly 3 year endeavor.

 

Soon after finishing, I was hired by Laika, where I worked for the next 7 years doing storyboards and character exploration, contributing to Oscar nominated films such as 'Paranorman', 'The Boxtrolls',  'Kubo and the Two Strings' and 'Missing Link'. Unfortunately, they refused to give me the title for the work I was doing, that of Character Art Director. By 2017 I realized I was done working for a hubristic, money-laundering personality cult, and I quit. I relocated my family to Spain to work as a senior animator on the Netflix film 'Klaus', fulfilling a lifelong dream to animate on a 2D feature. 

 

We returned to Portland in 2018, and I joined the production of  'Wendell and Wild', which ended up being another huge disappointment. When COVID sent everyone home, I began a 7 year period of working remotely for Netflix Animation Studios, contributing to such films as 'The Monkey King', 'The Prince of Port-Au-Prince' (canceled), and 'Just My Imagination'. Working on a film for 3 years just to see it canceled was, to say the least, disappointing. It became clear that after all that time, I was still largely unknown to the creative leads at Netflix. The familiar sound of hitting a career ceiling was, this time, loud and clear.

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I made the jump yet again to pursue a new more fulfilling path. This time I was lucky enough to find a passionate group of skateboarders, musicians and filmmakers in New Orleans calling themselves Swaybox Studios, who were forging an entirely new kind of animation based on live puppetry. They offered me the title of Character Art Director on an incredible project: 'Dynamic Duo', a bold reboot of the Robin character from the DCU, led by Matt Reeves and James Gunn. It was immediately clear I had found my most fulfilling path yet. I continue to work for Swaybox to this day.