After graduating from Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design in 2002, I began my early career as an Illustrator working on small jobs around town ranging from T-shirt designs, album artwork and newspaper ads for a local skate shop. It was then that I decided to fly the coup and see what other kinds of creative opportunities I could dig up. I packed my bags and headed west, to San Francisco.

I continued to freelance around San Francisco while diving deep into the local art scene. I acquired art studio space below Potrero Hill, where I’d spend the next five years creating everything from giant, graffiti inspired abstract paintings, to a series of palm-sized sculptures about a Secret Ninja Assassin Squad. With the little free time I had left in between art and bartending, I enrolled in a Flash Actionscript course at City College of San Francisco, to dip into the digital realm.

My education at City College helped kick-start my career as a multimedia specialist. I soon found myself working for the Defense Language Institute (DLI), a branch of the Army focused on training and doctrine command. I spent most of my time at DLI creating educational products that complimented their foreign language, customs and cultural awareness programs. After spending nearly 5 years here, I moved back to Denver for a new opportunity at the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON), in 2014.

As the Senior Multimedia Designer at NEON, I’m tasked with creating educational resources like videos, graphics and interactive content as part of NEON’s community engagement initiative. In this role, I have created an abundance of videos related to ecological processes and how scientists measure them. Since I began this project, I’ve helped grow the NEON Youtube following to almost 5,000 subscribers and close to 750k total views. Many of the videos have become the number one search result for that topic, and two of them were officially selected for the 2019 Colorado Environmental Film Festival in Golden.