I was born and raised in Denver, Colorado, where I graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Technical Communications and Film + Media Arts from Metropolitan State College of Denver in 2003. Somewhere between editing short films and trying (and failing) to be a computer scientist, I switched my minor to German. That small decision eventually set me on a path that would lead to Berlin.

If I’m honest, the story starts even earlier — with a fishing boat in Alaska and me losing the tip of my thumb. But let’s save that for a beer, not a professional website.

After college, I wrapped up my last credits at the Goethe Institut in Berlin. Instead of heading back to Colorado, I fell in with an actor’s collective and somehow never left. The plan at the time was to shoot a film adaptation of Chekhov’s The Seagull in a former Stasi bungalow resort. With a Mac laptop and Final Cut Pro under my arm, I spent six months couch-surfing, editing, and collaborating with Austrian director Gilbert Beronneau. That project led to another — Lunik, a film about utopian squatters in Eisenhüttenstadt, backed by the Berlin/Brandenburg Medienboard. Two films in, and Berlin had me hooked.

The next decade was my crash course in European filmmaking. I cut independent features and earned my stripes as an assistant editor on Babelsberg productions like The Reader (2008), Pandorum (2009), Hanna (2010), and Renegades (2016). Along the way, I learned how to balance creative storytelling with the technical demands of big studio workflows.

One of my most personal projects was Love Songs for Scumbags (2012), which I produced and edited with my longtime friend Phillip Duncan, an underground folk artist from Denver. The film — a kind of anti-biography — was completed just weeks before Phillip passed away. That experience remains one of the most formative of my career, shaping not just how I work, but why I work.

Since then, I’ve continued to edit across genres — from Christian Frosch’s Rough Road Ahead (Von Jetzt an kein Zurück), which earned me a German Film Critics Association nomination for Best Editing, to the hit Amazon series The Glory Is Gone (Der Lack ist ab) by Kai Wiesinger.