I myself host a recurring event called Clearness Committee which is a gathering to try to solve problems collectively. Every week, I gather a group of 15-20 folks in venues across the city (including art spaces like Plot, bookstores, and other galleries). Together, we consider a problem that one of the group members is experiencing and we try to help guide them towards clarity ONLY by asking them questions about their problem. The purpose of this method is to re connect folks with their own inner light which sometimes gets dimmed through looping thoughts, self-criticism, etc.

I led a city-wide tour across LA for a year that held pop up events in community gathering spaces such as WHAMMY! in Silver Lake and Lore Book Store in Leimert Park to connect communities with archival news footage of their city. These public programmings sought to connect community members with each other and their pasts. The organization of these events included building relationships with venue hosts, leading marketing campaigns on social and print channels, developing run of show for the day of, curating a lineup of other creatives/artists to show their work, and managing the events day-of.

Another professional community role I held was with the Brud team at Dapper Labs — the voice behind the online sensation (Lil) Miquela. My role as Senior Community Lead positioned me as a founding member of a new era for the company as they sought to decentralize their production operations and reimagine how artists can come together and create something collectively. I led this role during the heyday of the crypto craze which spun off concepts like the DAO which we sought to build in the infrastructure of a media sensation with millions of followers. In this role, I developed a community strategy to learn from artists, attract them to be a part of our community, nurture relationships with each other on a Discord channel, and also coordinate the production of media assets through the community. I hosted regular town hall meetings, met regularly with artists, created marketing campaigns to attract and retain community members, and interfaced with leadership to translate company KPIs into actionable community strategies.

I started my time in Los Angeles at UTA — a legacy Hollywood talent agency that was developing an industry-leading cultural advisory in the emerging Web3 space of decentralized internet creativity. In this role, I worked to manage partnerships between founders, creatives, brands, and cultural institutions. Some of my favorite parts of this job were bringing digital artists into legacy cultural spaces such as Sotheby’s, LACMA, LVMH, Samsung, and others. Additionally, I worked with artists and communities to develop community strategies around the emerging technologies of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) where we worked to reimagine what it looks like to own a creative story together.

I first started working in Community many moons ago at First Round — a VC based in San Francisco which led early-investment in projects ranging from seed to post-exit companies like Uber. They have long been an investment group which sought to reimagine the type of resources that could support a founder in their early stages beyond just capital. I stepped into an established laboratory of community initiatives to help founders grow their companies — we had established a private Reddit for founders to get advice from others across our entire "community" (a term we preferred over "portfolio") — we wanted to make it that this early stage founder could ask a question and maybe get an answer from Uber's CTO. In addition, we regularly organized programming and events at all sizes for our community of founders. I personally oversaw a new program to support summer interns at our community's companies — hosting lunch-and-learns, happy hours, and professional field trips with college-aged interns across the city.

My love, my life. My main community organizing home before I had one. I joined this institution ("the oldest continuously-published undergraduate literary magazine in the country" as they love to quip) as a freshman and devoted my life to sustaining the culture of the publication and community. I spent my time there designing the visual content of the quarterly magazine and digital content. Here, I led a team of devoted stewards of Ma Advo to pull off literary and communal magic (on the most unfathomably shoe-string budgets). My favorite part of my role here though was fostering a culture of change that sought to preserve its storied (and at times debaucherous) past with a new model for equitable organization that relied on a broader field of cultural workers. My favorite memory is weekly gatherings where we would gather over wine and cigarettes in the literal fire-box of a building and BROOD over the prior week.