About
I'm a narrative strategist and Director of Business Development at Story District, where I lead our storytelling programming.
Origin story
Early in my career, I lost a trial I should have won. I focused on the facts and the law, laid them out as clearly as I knew how. What I never gave the jury was a way to interpret what those facts meant. The other side did. They used story to do it, and they won.
That loss taught me something I've built a career on since: facts alone don't move people. The interpretation does. Storytelling isn't something you add to the truth to make it go down easier. It's a structural tool, and most experts have never been taught to use it.
The most capable people in any room are rarely the ones anyone remembers. Not because they lack expertise. Because they've spent years learning to perform it instead of share it. I help close that gap.
- Data is neutral. Story tells us what it means.
- If your story isn't connected to you, it's just more data.
- Storytelling calibrates judgment. Advocacy directs action.
- This is not about being more expressive. It's about being more precise.
Personal layer
Music is where I go when nothing else is running. I picked up the guitar in middle school and never put it down. I care about live music specifically, not just the recorded version, because to me the real test of any musician is whether they can do it in front of a room. My favorite place in D.C. is standing in a crowd at the 9:30 Club. I see somewhere around twenty shows a year here and on the road. That instinct, what happens when a room is fully with a performer, isn't separate from my work. For more than a decade I've also been the in-house DJ for Story District's live shows, DJ Sugar Pants, running walk-on and walk-off music for hundreds of tellers across hundreds of shows. Different stage, same instinct.
I'm also a long-suffering Arsenal supporter, twenty years now, so this year's Premier League title mattered more than I'll admit in most rooms. And I'm a political junkie from way back, political science in school, student government from elementary through college. Old habits that never left.
D.C. is the right place for this. Associations, foundations, the sciences, health institutions, they're all a few miles from each other here. I don't have to go looking for the work. It's already in the room.
I've watched a room of strangers stop being strangers through a story, the same way I've watched it happen through a song, everyone singing the same words at the same moment. I don't know yet whether that's just a nice parallel or something closer to the actual mechanism. Whether storytelling at scale can genuinely change how an organization bonds, not just how one person communicates. I think it can. I'm still finding out how far.
