U.S. Navy veteran, Rhode Island filmmaker, journalist, and writer behind The Suburban Country Boy™. The forms change, but most of the work comes back to the same thing: people, pressure, consequence, and what remains when the polished version of the story stops holding up.
I was born in Freeport, Illinois in 1982 and raised on a dirt road outside Jacksonville, Florida—the kind of place that forces awareness, consequence, and self-reliance early.
At nineteen, I left for Oklahoma, half a country away from anything familiar. No safety net. No fallback. Just a series of decisions that either held or didn’t.
At twenty-two, I enlisted in the U.S. Navy. I spent the first four years of my thirteen-year career aboard a fast-attack submarine, learning discipline in confined space, repetition, and consequence.
After that came two years with an Expeditionary Unit— different environment, same requirement: perform under pressure. The final seven years were spent as a Navy Recruiter, where I earned National Reserve Recruiter of the Year in 2013 and Regional Reserve Recruiter of the Year in 2014.
During that time, I built a family inside the operational rhythm of the military. My first son was born while I was still in uniform. My second arrived as I transitioned out. One system closed. Another began.
Those environments—rural upbringing, displacement, submarine patrols, expeditionary work, and recruiting— did not hand me some finished identity. They gave me a baseline: remain steady, don’t perform, and carry responsibility without inflation.
When I left the Navy, I did not transition cleanly. I dismantled what I was and rebuilt from the ground up.
I studied Digital Media Production at the New England Institute of Technology and later completed a Film & Video Certification through Full Sail University . The value was not the credential. It was understanding systems, tools, and constraints well enough to operate without hiding behind them.
My early work in film was intermittent and practical— 48-hour challenges, short productions, and small crews. Enough to understand how decisions degrade under time, how plans fail, and how people actually behave when pressure is introduced.
Remain steady. Don’t perform. Carry responsibility without inflation.
I keep coming back to the same territory: motive, power, justice, wrongdoing, fear, loyalty, self-interest, love, vice, survival, violence, morality, courage, weakness, and contradiction.
I’m interested in what happens when somebody can no longer maintain the version of themselves they present to the world.
Journalism can document what human beings actually did. Film can explore what human beings are capable of doing. Writing gives me room to pull at the motives, contradictions, and systems underneath both.
I didn’t set out to collect unrelated projects. Film, reporting, and writing ended up becoming different ways of looking at the same animal.
People are complicated. We lie to ourselves, protect what we love, misuse power, do the right thing for the wrong reason, do the wrong thing for reasons we understand perfectly, and build systems that eventually reveal the people inside them.
Reporting is where the question becomes documentary: What happened? Who did what? What do the records show? Who had power, who was affected by it, and what deserves to remain on the public record?
The story is usually human before it is political.
Visit the ChronicleFilm gives me room to push a person into circumstances where the clean answer disappears. Fear. Loyalty. Violence. Love. Self-preservation. Vice. Sacrifice. Contradiction.
Perfect heroes and perfect villains don’t interest me much. What interests me is what remains when pressure makes the mask impossible to maintain.
Enter Rustic Lens CinemaI write about politics, culture, institutions, history, power, and current events when they expose something underneath them.
Self-interest. Tribalism. Justice. Fear. Deception. Contradiction. Politics isn’t really the point. People are.
Read ObservationsOutside of production, I stay anchored to physical reality. I volunteer at Winslow Farm Animal Sanctuary . There is something useful about work that does not care about your résumé, opinion, audience, or self-image. Something needs doing. You do it.
I’m also a lifelong musician. Music enforces structure. You either keep time, or you don’t.
I live in Cumberland, Rhode Island with my family. The country still informs the posture—not as nostalgia, and not as a costume. Carry your weight. Speak plainly. Build things that hold when conditions stop being convenient.
This isn’t a finished biography. It’s a working record—where I’ve been, what I’m building, what I’ve learned, what I’ve gotten wrong, and the questions I still haven’t settled.
I don’t make the work to chase trends or approval. I do want it to matter. And I want it to reach people.
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