About

My expertise is born of over 15 years working in communications — including half a decade in the NYC crisis PR world — and a lifetime of writing and telling stories of all stripes.

I am fluent in Customer, Storyteller, Reporter, Professor, Philosopher, Clown and other languages, and love helping people who speak these different social languages communicate with one another.

Before I knew what "social science" was, I was practicing it — absorbing every story I could find to understand, through characters, how humans react, communicate, and solve problems under pressure. Storytelling was also just fun. (You don't really understand humanity until you've sat alone on a stage dressed as a giant ketchup bottle).

Over the past 15+ years that's looked like: crisis communications at Hiltzik Strategies in New York; communications infrastructure for Define American across three stints; external stakeholder communications for a $500M+ enterprise transformation at Southern California Edison; translating UCLA faculty research into plain language; and consulting with founders, executives, and researchers on how to say what they actually mean.

Right now I'm building Muse Meets Machine, an open notebook at the intersection of human voice and AI. I'm also working on a screenplay, a pilot, and a play, and writing LED Musings on Substack for the love of it.

Born and raised in New Jersey, I earned B.A. degrees in Journalism & Mass Communication and Sociology from NYU, and lived in NYC for a decade before moving to Los Angeles.

In 2018, I earned an M.A. in Social Science from UCLA, where I built my own qualitative coding system to decode, study and write about how values are embedded in the words we use (spoiler alert: they’re everywhere!)

Find me on LinkedIn or follow the work in progress on GitHub.