Some backstory…
I'm the CEO of Dot Connector, a strategy and futuring consultancy I co-founded with the late Jessica Clark in 2013. But my origin story involves a stolen copy machine, a homemade zine, and a $1 cover charge. In high school, my friend and I were appointed editors of the school newspaper, and promptly quit when we discovered "editor" meant following someone else's rules about what was worth saying. We decided to make our own underground zine instead and sell it in the hallways. It was ours to fill however we liked: cut-out magazine letters, hand-drawn comics, and biting takedowns of our school’s archaic rules. I have been a creative entrepreneur finding alternative paths outside official channels ever since.
That early instinct—Why patch a broken system when you can build a better one?—has shaped everything that followed. I've spent my career building the structures that allow people to work in ways that genuinely make sense for them, and then, when those structures weren't enough, building better ones. I worked outside traditional employment long before it had a name or a cultural moment: collaborating, launching, raising millions in funding, guiding teams through genuine crises, and co-founding a boutique organizational culture firm because I'd spent enough time inside broken workplaces to know that better was genuinely possible.
My path has never followed a straight line, and that's kind of the point. From academic research centers to environmental nonprofits, enterprise tech to documentary film, I've developed a fluency in understanding the challenges organizations across industries, of different scales and with varying missions, face. My non-linear career is a lifelong practice of learning to see systems from the outside—to understand how they shape human experience, and to imagine what else might be possible.
That sensibility drives my strategic work. My years-long partnership with Media Impact Funders helped reshape how the media philanthropy field defines success for social-change media. My scenario planning work, investment analyses, and impact framework development across major philanthropic organizations and dozens of initiatives share a consistent methodology: start with values, track the signals, map what's missing, and design toward something more honest.
A proud Philadelphian, I hold an MA in Media Studies from Temple University, where I studied how media messages and tools shape relationships, health, work, and happiness. Most often, you can find me rummaging through a Little Free Library like it’s an archaeological dig.
(The original zine is unfortunately out of print, but you can find a later zine in the Barnard Zine Library and decades of writing—including Philadelphia’s very first nonprofessional food blog—in various other places if you look hard enough!)
