Every job I have held has been the same job underneath: working out what somebody needed to say, and finding the way to say it so the right people heard it. The tools changed a great deal. The work did not.

I made my first films in high school in Fort McMurray, with a group I started because a few of us had bigger ideas than a northern town had places to put them. Sketches, shot on whatever gear we could borrow. YouTube did not exist yet, so we built a website and published them there ourselves. At the time that felt like the obvious solution. In hindsight it was the first digital media work I ever did.

In 2006, at 20, I started a small business in Edmonton called Blue Sky Studios, making wedding films. I ran it for four years. Weddings teach you what film school does not. You get one take, the light is whatever it is, and the people in front of you are not performing, they are living the day. Your job is to be trusted enough to be in the room.

From 2010 I spent seven years in hospitality, most of it as a hotel concierge in Edmonton, including at the Delta Edmonton Centre and with Fairmont Hotels & Resorts. I earned membership in Les Clefs d’Or, the international society of hotel concierges, whose members wear crossed golden keys on their lapel. Fewer than 100 concierges in Canada hold them. It is the least parochial work I have ever done. You spend every day with people from somewhere else, and Les Clefs d’Or is a global society, so those years took me into a lot of other people’s cities and showed me how differently a place can be run.

People hear concierge and think hospitality. It is a communications job. You spend the day working out what someone actually needs when what they asked for was something else, then deliver it without fuss. That is most of this job too.

Those were also the years I put the video camera down and bought a Canon Rebel. I took courses and photographed the cities I love: Stockholm, Monterrey, New York, St. John’s, and this one. Many of the photographs on this site come from that stretch.

In 2017 communications became the whole job. I was general manager of two Edmonton restaurants, Tres Carnales and Kanu Cafe, running the floor and the communications and social media both. This is where I learned that the marketing and the operation are the same conversation. From 2019 I moved into campaigns, advocacy, and the nonprofit sector, where I have managed campaigns as well as run their communications and social media. Close to a dozen of them now.

In 2023 I stood as a candidate myself, for the Alberta NDP in Fort McMurray–Lac La Biche, completing the party’s full slate of 87. Running where you are not expected to win teaches you how to talk to people who do not already agree with you, on a budget, with a deadline that does not move. I also spent a year as a communications advisor at a primary care network in the Edmonton region. Health communications is where plain language stops being a style preference and starts deciding who can act on information and who cannot.

Today I work with the local offices of MLAs, nonprofits, and small local businesses across the Edmonton region. I have managed a municipal council campaign and produced its video, and I finished two video projects this summer, for Apache Pipelines and GRM, with a small crew I trust.

Same thing I was doing in a Fort McMurray high school. Better gear, better reason.

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