eassae

An overview of my life/career is anything but linear. I hold a BFA from the University of Utah and an MFA in painting from Pratt Institute, where I was selected for their Symposium Program with visiting critics Robert Storr, David Levi Strauss, and Donald Kuspit. During the course of my higher education, most of my work was done outside of the school atmosphere in privately rented studios and concurrently displayed in three solo exhibitions.

After finishing my MFA I began a career in film and commercial production, moving from production assistant to prop master and production designer in under a year. I have production designed two feature length films, and worked on countless commercials and fashion shoots, including working as a set dresser for Annie Leibovitz and Steven Meisel.

Alongside the production work I taught myself web design and development, drawn in by the problem solving. That thread eventually became the center of my professional life, and for the past 14 years I have worked as a web manager, developer, and AV producer, for the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City.

In 2006 my wife suggested I try GarageBand. Two weeks later I had written and recorded ten songs and was already outgrowing the software, so I sank a significant amount into a home recording studio and never looked back. Over the past twenty years I have released 11 LPs, 2 Double Length LPs, and 1 EP of electronic and experimental music. In 2022 I was named Grand Prize Winner of the John Lennon Songwriting Contest in the Electronic category and was a finalist in 2023 and 2024.

In 2009, I packed up all my belongings and moved to New Zealand, where I now have permanent residence status. NZ wasn’t my cup of tea, so in 2011 I sold everything I owned except two suitcases, a camera, a really big knife, and a laptop, and moved to Paris, where I spent my time walking the streets, taking photos, and writing a novel titled Every which received an honorable mention in the 2016 Writer’s Digest Self-Published Book Awards. Unfortunately, France did not want to grant me permanent residence status, so I returned to Brooklyn in 2011.

Currently, my projects include running the independent music label CC Undefined that I started in 2021, and teaching Bruce Lee’s Jeet Kune Do at New York Martial Arts Academy a few days a week. I have been awarded composer residencies at the Visby International Centre for Composers in 2019, 2023, 2024, 2026, 2027, and 2028. Also, for the past three years I’ve been trying to get better at indoor bouldering, but I spend a lot of time on the mat 🙂