My work has always lived at the intersection of content, structure, and people. With over 15 years of spanning agencies, cultural institutions, universities, and a beloved college radio station, the throughline has been figuring out who something is actually for, and then doing the work to get it right for them.
That work is grounded in equal parts practice and theory. A BFA in Photography trained my eye for visual communication and composition, while a master's in communication and media studies gave me a rigorous framework for understanding how information moves between people and systems, and what gets lost along the way.
Technically I've gained experience across content strategy and IA, UX research and usability testing, digital and email marketing, analytics, accessibility, and front-end development. My research background extends into quantitative methods, which shapes how I think about data and evidence in design decisions.
On the philosophical end of things, it's meant being an advocate first. Whether I'm running stakeholder interviews for a university redesign or making the case for plain-language content, the instinct is the same: take the audience seriously, listen before designing, and make sure their needs don't get lost when organizational priorities get loud.
What ties it all together is a genuine belief that the people on the other side of a website deserve to be taken seriously. That's not really a methodology. It's just how I work.
Sound Advice PHL is a weekly newsletter I founded and write/edit, covering upcoming concerts and music events in the greater Philadelphia area. I curate a short list of shows worth your attention, cutting through the noise of contradictory listings, algorithmic weirdness, and the general chaos of trying to figure out what's actually happening and worth leaving the house for.
The newsletter exists because writing about local music matters, and that kind of coverage has been gutted over the past two decades, most visibly by the slow death of the alternative weekly. Sound Advice isn't trying to be a full replacement, but it's trying to fill the gap between scanning a listings aggregator and spotting a flyer on a coffee shop wall. The name itself is borrowed from the previews section of the now-defunct Philadelphia City Paper, where I was a contributor in the early 2000s.
I run it on top of my day job, entirely self-funded, with a readership that's grown solely through word of mouth.
I work at the intersection of research, storytelling, and problem-solving, helping clients build websites that actually work for the people who use them. That means collaborating closely with designers and developers to turn strategic goals into something that's not just functional, but genuinely good.
Every project kicks off with a deep dive (aka "Discovery"): interviews, focus groups, workshops, surveys, competitive analysis, content audits, usability testing. I like to think of this phase as getting to know them. From there, I distill what we've learned into deliverables that give the whole team something to work with: creative briefs, personas, journey maps, functional requirements, information architecture, content strategy, and more. The north star throughout remains the same—what does the client need, what does their audience need, and how do we honor both?
Beyond client work, I've also invested in making our Strategy team sharper. Drawing on my background in social science research methods, I've helped solidify our discovery process and provided documentation and mentorship on our approaches. That includes maintaining internal process documentation as well as a suite of client-facing presentation decks—covering Discovery, Information Architecture, Content Strategy, Content Production, and Content Migration—so clients arrive at each milestone knowing what they're looking at and why it matters.
I was the connective tissue between PAFA's digital presence and its broader institutional goals—reporting to the SVP of Enrollment & Strategic Communications and keeping the wheels turning across the organization's websites, email, social, and advertising channels.
On the web side, I managed day-to-day content operations, SEO, and governance for a team of 10 institutional content managers, while also coordinating front-end development and CMS work with an agency partner. A major highlight was leading the overhaul of PAFA's website and Drupal CMS upgrade—rearchitecting the information architecture, content models, and UI, and migrating over 16,000 pages in the process. That redesign went on to earn a 2020 Webby Award for Best College/University Website.
Email and social kept me equally busy. I planned, built, and deployed campaigns end-to-end—writing copy, designing in HTML, building assets in Photoshop, and QA-ing via Litmus—while managing list hygiene across Blackbaud and other CRMs. Paid media rounded out the mix, with display and PPC campaigns running across AdWords, Facebook, Twitter, and Outbrain.
I was responsible for the end-to-end production of digital marketing assets across the company's two brands, Motherhood Maternity and A Pea in the Pod. That meant designing and building marketing emails, display banners, SMS images, A/B campaigns, and transactional messages, while also pitching in on copywriting as needed. Day-to-day, I coordinated closely with the Merchandising and Ecommerce teams to keep campaigns on schedule, and handled all loading and QA in the ESP.
By the time I left, I had built upwards of 3,000 emails—and somewhere in that stack was a single message that broke a company sales record, bringing in $1M on its own.
I was brought onto a team that was just beginning to think about user experience as a discipline. In practice, the role skewed more toward web content management than UX work—a common reality in organizations still figuring out what "UX" actually means in their context.
Within that ambiguity, I contributed where I could: conducting user research, developing personas, running usability tests, and building wireframes, while also handling day-to-day content needs and assessing the site's information architecture. WRDS is a substantive platform with 600+ databases serving 530+ institutions across the world, which made the lack of established UX practice all the more noticeable. If nothing else, the role gave me an early and clear-eyed understanding of what happens when user needs aren't built into a team's process from the start.
I managed the College's web presence and social media accounts, produced analytics reports for the Dean, and served as liaison between the College and university-level communications and IT groups. The most substantive project of my tenure was overseeing the migration of the College's static HTML site to WordPress—a meaningful infrastructure improvement, even if the conditions around it left something to be desired.
The role was created by people who didn't have a strong grasp of what web work actually involves, which made for a position that was equal parts underdefined and underresourced. It was an early lesson in organizational dynamics and the particular frustrations of trying to do good work without institutional backing—one that's informed how I think about web governance and team structure ever since.
As a graduate adjunct, I supported course instruction under faculty supervision—leading classroom discussions, preparing materials, and grading assignments.
WPRB was, frankly, one of the best jobs I've ever had—and it wasn't even a year-round gig. As Summertime Sales & Marketing Manager for Princeton's 103.3 FM, I got to spend two summers doing work that sat squarely at the intersection of music, community, and communications. It was scrappy, it was fun, and it reminded me that the best community-building happens when the people doing it actually care about the community they're building for.
Day-to-day, I oversaw operations for the Sales and Marketing departments, developed and executed the station's marketing and digital strategy, redesigned the station's graphic identity and WordPress blog, and managed its social media presence. I also helped plan the annual on-air fundraiser and organized over 20 station-sponsored events—including a "Free Yr Radio"-sponsored concert and sweepstakes whose grand prize was, wonderfully, a 2008 Toyota Yaris.
For nearly two decades—running concurrently with my time as Summertime Sales & Marketing Manager and well beyond—I was a volunteer on-air DJ at WPRB 103.3 FM. What started as a weekly program slot became one of the longest-running threads of my career, even if it never once paid me a cent.
The most substantial thing I built there was Pop Recon, a monthly music culture interview series I conceived, produced, and hosted from scratch—originally developed as an independent study project during my graduate work at Temple. It became the station's first podcast, which meant figuring out not just the editorial and production side—interviewing artists, editing segments in ProTools and Logic, digitizing archival reel-to-reel recordings—but also the technical infrastructure: an XML-based podcast archive, music clearance and licensing, and episode publicity.
Beyond Pop Recon, I trained incoming DJs in station operations on an ad hoc basis. I also hosted a 12-hour New Year's Eve marathon in 2008 counting down the station's top 103 releases of the year, and was invited to speak on a panel about radio at the Philadelphia GRAMMYs chapter's "Independents Day" conference that same year.
Plain Parade was a labor of love in the most literal sense—an unpaid, DIY concert promotion venture I ran with my best friend for six years. Together, we presented roughly 250 live events across music, theater, literature, and comedy, driven entirely by a belief that our city's local music community deserved good shows in good spaces.
The recognition that followed was gratifying—including nods from Philadelphia Weekly and multiple Philadelphia City Paper Choice Awards—but it was never the point. Plain Parade was about building something for a community we were already part of, and doing it on our own terms.
