I’ve spent most of my life caught between two worlds: intellect and emotion, high theory and real-world culture, institutions and street-level truth. This work — helping artists and creators be understood — is my way of reconciling these worlds. And it brings me back, in a sense, to where I started: as an arts journalist in my hometown of Toronto twenty years ago, now with miles of experience behind me. As is often the case, the longest road leads back to where you came.

Interviewing artists and musicians back then, I discovered my true joy: bringing challenging and inspiring art to the public. Understanding it, and sharing that understanding with others. 

I’m an intellectual person and enjoy things like reading Kant and staring at a Caravaggio in the Gemäldegalerie. But I’d just as soon bump Outkast while drinking a beer on a Sunday in Mauerpark. And I like talking to all kinds of people. I enjoy, as Germans say, meeting people at eye level. 

But the problem with living between worlds, I would learn, is that you belong to neither. Too intellectual for the street. Too street for the classroom. That’s how it often felt.

And so at a certain point in my twenties, journalism seemed shallow to me. I wanted to go deeper in my thinking, and enrolled in a PhD program in German literature at Cornell University. There, I learned the history of literature and art, and trained to operate at a high conceptual level, publishing papers on Walter Benjamin’s theory of art and eighteenth-century German playwrights, for example.

But my real pleasure remained making such high concepts relevant to the public today. I tried to do this kind of work inside the academy — designing and teaching a course to undergrads on the social significance of team sports, for example. But I was met with institutional resistance the whole way. 

The university liked, it turned out, their obscure thematics and their obtuse, gatekeeping language because, well, they were gatekeepers. They didn’t want to let the public in.

So I left. I spent six years in marketing and sales in the wine industry — first in the beautiful upstate New York countryside and then here in Berlin. I returned to the world of the senses; I found immediacy again and met unpretentious people. And my language became public once more. 

In the wine industry, I honed my ability to read an audience, speak in their own language, and build connections in real time, with everyone from rural Pennsylvanians, sommeliers at Michelin-starred restaurants in New York City, to hip restaurateurs in Berlin.

But I had gone too far in the other direction. It was all surface-level.

So I returned to arts journalism, and began the work I do now. To me, this work is a culmination of all these experiences. It isn’t just about messaging or branding. It’s about giving voice to people and projects that matter, and helping creators be seen, heard, and understood in ways that feel true to who they are. It’s about showing that complexity can have public impact, and doesn’t need to be ignored, oversimplified, or theorized to death. 

I feel uniquely privileged to offer this kind of work, because I know what it's like to not easily fit into a category. True art and cultural work speaks for itself, it doesn’t need our labels, whether memes, political categories, or hip theoretical concepts. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be translated for a wider audience. 

I believe that finding authentic language for such translation requires empathy, listening, and mutual understanding. That’s the kind of communication I’m committed to: helping artists and organizations connect without losing themselves.