What more do you need to know?  The relevant facts, I suppose.  I was born in Connecticut and raised in Maine.  I went to boarding school in Massachusetts for my Junior and Senior year, took a year off to be a ski bum before matriculating at Hamilton College (class of 1992), where I majored in Comparative Religious Studies (my thesis was on the subject of Jesus as a political revolutionary), and soon thereafter moved to San Francisco, where I lived for about 5 years.  Still miss San Francisco sometimes.  Beautiful city.  Great food.  Seemed like everyone I knew at the time was either in or lived with a band. I even sang in one for a brief, sodden moment, but that didn’t stick.  Also played a lot of competitive Ultimate Frisbee, which may sound ludicrous to some, but for those who know anything about it, they know how consuming that can be.  Also rode in my first Critical Mass bike rides while I was there, and that did stick.  I also began making films during that time.  Short, experimental films shot on Super-8 and edited on the A-B roll video editing machines at Artists Television Access on Valencia St.

I left San Francisco to take an extended trip through Asia in 1996, just before the Internet revolution made leaving your home turf a “virtual” impossibility.  I cycled down the coast of Vietnam with my friend Scheffer, went to the island of Ko Samet in Thailand, traveled up the river Kwai to Kanchanaburi, hiked the Annapurna circuit in Nepal, and wandered up the Karakorum highway in Pakistan, almost up to the Khyber pass, along the route of the ancient Silk Road.  All in all I was traveling for 9 months.  I came back to a job teaching religious studies at my high school alma mater, which I did for one very interesting and challenging year.  You try living in a dorm with 40 privileged prep school boys.

All this while I had been making films, writing screenplays, and also becoming evermore disgusted with the mainstream media, as they conglomerated and obfuscated and distracted the American people from what was happening to their country.   I had always been politically concerned, and was somewhat of a campus activist during my college years, but by this time my sense of outrage had become focused primarily on the “fourth estate” as it were.

I came to New York City in 1998 to go seek a Masters Degree in Media Studies at New School University (class of 2001).  While there I focused on Documentary Film Studies, with an avowed interest in the political economy of mass media.  In my spare time I found myself becoming increasingly involved as a political activist, working on issues of both local and international significance.  The first struggle to draw me in was the campaign to save the community gardens, which Giuliani was attempting to auction off to the highest bidders.  That campaign brought me into contact with Reclaim the Streets, with whom I continued to organize for the next 4 years, primarily within what has been called the anti-corporate-globalization movement.  I was in Seattle in 1999 to help shut down the WTO ministerial, and I must say it was one of the most incredible weeks of my entire life.  While there I was a part of the first Independent Media Center, which was set up there to cover the protests.  We created a 5 part video series called Showdown in Seattle which went on to festivals around the world and was arguably the most complete document to date of those truly historic days.