Artist Profile

I have had a long and meandering path through the arts. So, this blurb is going to be long and meandering. 

I earned my MFA in Acting from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts.  In NYC I was lucky enough to collaborate with Tony Kushner premiering four of his earlier plays, and to develop new work at places like the Circle Repertory Company, Playwights Horizons, and New Dramatists. I also began writing for young people in New York through publishers like Scholastic Inc., Chelsea House Publishers and the Children's Television Workshop.  After a decade in Brooklyn, my wife Robin and I moved to Los Angeles, where I wrote seven chatty, glossy, books on the confluence of film and American culture, as well as a film biography of (gulp) Elvis Presley. I was set to write a book for Hitchcock's centenary, but that went south thanks to Universal. In L.A. I also worked with a group called the Virginia Avenue Project, teaching playwrighting to underresourced young people and then producing their wonderful plays. I even got to play an aging, alcoholic, Italian gardener caught in a codependent relationship with his pet Venus Flytrap, complete with operatic arias, written by a ten-year-old appropriately named Fausto Perez. 

We eventually moved to DC where I worked as Director of Programming and Curriculum Development (a D.C. title if there ever was one) for the DC Trust for Youth -- and later for DC's Deputy Mayor of Education. During that time, I got to collaborate with many DC museums and art and cultural institutions. I also got to produce and direct a citywide youth performing arts showcase called "We Got Next" at the Atlas and write and host a couple seasons of the local cable show "School's Out!" celebrating the cool things young people were doing after school in DC. 

During this time I began taking photographs, had a solo show called "Snapshots of the Almighty" at New Community's ArtSpace, and exhibited at the Circle Gallery in Annapolis and the University of Maryland Gallery in College Park -- where I  met and eventually collaborated with my painter friend Kathryn O'Grady on a series of first person, wild animal, portrait/story pairings called "We of the Webbed Feet." They've been exhibited  at some wildlife centers and at the Massoni Gallery in Chestertown. Most recently, I've tried to write plays. My first, about politics, A Chicken Will Starve Without Stone, was a semi-finalist at the National Playwrights Conference. My play, Willful, is currently slated to run in repertory with Flesh and Blood Stories in the far-off country of Wales.