About Me
I started my professional career working on websites in San Francisco during the late stages of the dot-com gold rush, when everyone had a foosball table and no one had a business model. After the boom went bust, I switched to magazines, just as the consequences of the internet on traditional publishing paradigms were beginning to be felt. Over the last decade I’ve worked on both platforms, doing some events and consulting along the way. As an editor and writer, I’ve covered indie rock, independent filmmaking, music video, motion graphics, prankster art, consumer products, personal tech, web design, activist engineering, progressive fashion, and other far-flung subjects in the vortex of music, film, art, fashion, technology, and design. I’ve worn almost as many hats, serving not only as a wordsmith but also on occasion as a curator, project manager, event producer, web architect, and ad sales dude.
I was most recently the final editor-in-chief of the venerable design magazine I.D., which published its last issue in January of 2010 after 55 years of helping shape the American and international design landscape. I took the job after serving as a contributing editor for more than three years, entering during an editorial vacuum, and kept the augmented bimonthly (it came out seven times a year) on track as the leader of a team of four.
Prior to that, I spent a year as editor of the glossy men’s fashion and culture magazine V Man, part of the Visionaire family, which I took from biannual to quarterly. I also oversaw the redesign of the magazine’s online presence and managed a blog and other daily content for the site.
In 2007 and early 2008 I worked for the Tribeca Film Festival. There, I built and operated this short-lived progressive culture site, and worked with two colleagues to conceive and program a bicoastal event showcasing creative innovation called the Creators Series. Later I served as editorial director for the Tribeca Film Festival’s own site, expanding its independent editorial content and overseeing its relaunch as a comprehensive year-round film and entertainment portal.
I came to TFF after a long stint with the dear departed RES magazine, an early investigator and champion of emerging digital culture, with which I was associated from 2002 until 2006, first as a contributing editor, then as senior editor, then finally as the magazine’s co-editor until its demise at the end of 2006. I also managed the websites for RES and its sibling RESFEST, an international touring festival for which I was a regular programming consultant.
Before that, I was the editor of the pioneering curatorial mp3 site Epitonic.com, which won a Webby award in 2003 and was, in many ways, the predecessor to the kinds of music sites and mp3 blogs that have become so common today. I’ve also tackled web projects for entertainment company Palm Pictures. And I’ve been programmer of music videos and short films for the Webby award–winning VOD site Sputnik7, a freelance curator for Gen Art, a contributing editor for the quarterly nonfiction journal Topic, and a contributor to the social news site BuzzFeed. My writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, BusinessWeek, I.D., Fast Company, GOOD, Print, Paper, V, V Man, RES, and other publications.
I grew up in California, Connecticut, and Washington state, and attended Wesleyan University, where I wrote a thesis about race, class, and geography in midcentury American literature, for which I won a cash prize that allowed me to settle up with the registrar’s office and walk in my graduation ceremony in 1999. I live in Brooklyn with my girlfriend, Chi, and my cats, Punch and Judy. I’m a Capricorn and I was born in the Year of the Snake. Here I am on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, Delicious, Flickr, Last.fm, and GoodReads. This is my resume, and here are some samples of my writing. You can email me here.
