As a Chattanooga native, born and bred, my career path has returned me back to my hometown multiple times.  I have lived in and worked as a theatre artist in many locations, ranging from small communities to large metropolitan areas and I have always felt more at home here in Chattanooga.  After I graduated from East Ridge High School in 1994, I attended a small liberal arts college in North Carolina on a full academic scholarship where I majored in Theatre with the intended goal of being a director.  In four years at Catawba College, I managed to direct three shows, design costumes for six productions and form a touring children’s theatre troupe.  Our troupe, AS SILLY AS WE WANNA BE, included original scripts performed by a company of six college students at city and county elementary schools within a 45 mile radius of the school.  The troupe lasted for my final four semesters and continued for several more after my graduation providing the college with both an outreach and recruitment tool.  My contribution to the department was honored with the highest award given by Catawba’s theatre department.  Upon graduation, I spent a year working in Orlando and then another year working for the prestigious regional theatre Arena Stage in Washington DC.  As I was to start my second year in DC, I was given a call by Rodney Vanvalkenburg, then Producing Director of the Chattanooga Theatre Centre, and offered a job.  Although the job paid less and required more effort, it was an opportunity that I could not pass up.  For the next three years I worked as the Youth Theatre Director at the Chattanooga Theatre Centre.  As a product and alumnus of that same program in high school, it had been my ambition to follow in the footsteps of Rodney- one of my mentors.  My primary aim with the youth theatre, and I feel my tenure proved successful, was to enrich the youth theatre programming by raising the bar on the production elements, experience, and education of each production.  It was not enough in my mind to merely provide opportunities or give parents another extracurricular activity to fawn over, I desired that and more.  After my time at the Theatre Centre came to a close, my next move was graduate school at The University of Mississippi where I would earn an MFA in Directing.  Prior to commencing with my studies, the Southeastern Theatre Conference (the largest of its kind in the nation) saw fit to reward my work with children’s theatre with the Leighton Ballew MFA Directing Scholarship.  In my three years at Ole Miss, I directed more than ten productions, designed costumes for a couple more, produced and established a bi-annual ten minute play festival, provided artistic and administrative assistance in the formation of a summer Shakespeare festival, and began writing plays.  I graduated in 2006 with my MFA and for the last 18mos have been on staff with the Professional Actor Training Program here at Chattanooga State as a designer, instructor and director.  Since the summer of my freshman year of college, I have spent practically every summer participating in summer theatre programs.  These have included multiple summers in upstate New York, Daytona Beach, Massachusetts, Alabama, Mississippi, and Oklahoma.  Last summer I produced and created a Chattanooga’s own summer theatre festival presenting four cutting edge productions.  This summer will find four more productions in what will be an annual professional summer theatre here in our backyard.  My primary philosophy with theatre is that a) lack of means or resources should never be an excuse for a mediocre product and b) the bar should continue to rise higher and higher on content, form and the value to the artist and the audience.  I use my craft as an opportunity creator.  Theatre can teach, theatre can be therapeutic, theatre can entertain and theatre can enrich.  As a matter of fact, it SHOULD do all of those things.

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