I wrote a book once about a woman named Echo who designs her way out of a paper bag. Someone had told her she couldn't. She took it as a compliment — paper bags are fragile. And you best shift problems permanently, by redesigning reality. 
 

I've spent twenty-plus years doing that same work for everyone else. People. Companies. Organizations. Governments. Helping them tell the story they didn't know they were carrying.

Not the campaigns. Not the awards (though the awards are nice). The moment. The one where a person, a team, a whole culture realizes their story matters — and that the work was never boring. They were just telling it wrong.

storylab is mine. I built it from zero and spent eight years with Saudi healthcare, the UN, BBVA, the Dubai World

Expo — all asking the same question. How do we make people care about what we do? How do we design a story that moves a human to act?

The answer never changes. Find the simplicity inside the complexity. Find the human inside the story. Teach the tools. Hand over the confidence to tell it out loud.

That last part is the part I love most.

I teach strategic design at Parsons — graduate students, real clients, the messy place where craft meets the business that pays for it. I've keynoted and built masterclasses with Innovation360 for leaders from

Kuwait to Bangalore to Zurich. But the room I keep coming back to is the one with the student who doesn't believe they have it yet. I didn't either, once. I built a whole practice out of proving I did. Watching someone else get there beats any award.

I've also run brand and creative for a 99-year-old infrastructure firm — 12,000 people, 22 design leaders across the US, Chile, and the Philippines, 500-plus designers, four brands, five sectors. My actual job was making them braver. Same job, bigger room.

I'm a Cherokee storyteller. A published author. A hands-on AI practitioner since 2017, because I believe it should make us more human, not less.

Awards, since you asked: 6 Grand Jury Prizes, 5 Audience Awards, 1 Best Actor, 1 Best Marketing, 1 Manager of the Year. (Told you. Nice.)

I run with a herd — people who care about craft AND culture, frameworks AND feelings, doing the work AND building each other up. Hard to bore. Easy to build with.

Proud dad of Lavender (anthropology and indigenous studies at Brown) and Moss (off to SCAD to play lacrosse and design a better world).

Former touring hip-hop, poplock, and break dancer. Music video choreographer in another life. I will absolutely start a dance battle on a boat in Paris if the moment calls for it.

So. Stretch out.