My Story

How do we make stories that don’t just show the world, but answer it?

Where you land in life is often luck. Or timing. Or chaos.

But who do you become? That’s on you.

I grew up comfortable. Upper-class. Safe. My father was a vice president at Seagram’s. Then one day, my mother found out he’d been laid off. Six months earlier. 

No one told us. That moment cracked everything open.

Our house disappeared. Stability too. We bounced between short-term rentals while my mother rebuilt her life, dragging my sister and me along with her. It wasn’t tragic in the movie sense. It was disorienting. And formative.

By fifteen, I read constantly. Not for school. For survival. Books became my map. History. Historical novels. Big lives across long stretches of time. That reading pushed me into a wild decision: a scholarship to finish high school in London. Alone. No family. Just books and curiosity. London did something to me. So did traveling solo across Europe. When you’re young and alone, fiction becomes a lens, not an escape. 

I started noticing how stories bleed into real life. How the past hums inside the present. How imagined worlds quietly shape the one we live in.

After two years of roaming, I returned to the United States and earned a master’s in theater directing. In 1985, Lincoln Center Theater hired me. A few years later, I founded Novel Stages in Philadelphia, asking a simple question: what if theater didn’t just adapt plays, but welcomed writers and visual artists who had never worked onstage?

That question led me into education and eventually into academic leadership as a dean of theater and film. I was hired to modernize programs, but I quickly learned that surface change wasn’t enough. The conservatory mindset—protecting old forms, networks, and rules—was cultural, not just theatrical. If the system was going to change, I had to change too.

In 2007, I encountered transmedia, and it shifted my thinking. Stories no longer had to sit still. They could move across platforms, invite participation, and build communities instead of passive audiences. Social media was emerging, XR was nascent, and AI wasn’t yet central, but the direction was clear. I rebuilt courses and pushed my students and myself into unfamiliar territory.

That approach shaped projects in China and consulting work across the U.S., Europe, and the Middle East, including Iraq, where I begin by listening first always.

Teaching has never left the picture. The classroom is where ideas get stress-tested. Script analysis. Worldbuilding. AI-driven narrative media. It’s all one conversation.

At the center of everything I do is one question I keep circling back to:

How do we make stories that don’t just show the world, but answer it?