ACTOR. I'm a New York-based actor and a native of Nashville, Tennessee, where I grew up in a family of three generations of ministers.
TV roles include The Night Agent (Netflix), Griselda (Netflix), American Horror Stories (Hulu), Zero Day (Netflix), Elsbeth (CBS), FBI: Most Wanted (CBS), Law & Order (NBC), Law & Order: Organized Crime (NBC), Étoile (Amazon), Godfather of Harlem (MGM+), General Hospital (ABC), The Young and the Restless (CBS), and Power Book III: Raising Kanan (STARZ).
FILM roles include Frank Sabatella’s The Shed with Frank Whaley and Timothy Bottoms, Clarence Fuller’s Signs of Love with Rosanna Arquette and Hopper Penn, Bill Crossland’s Catching Up with Sam Daly and Jonathan Fernandez, and Valerie Smaldone’s The Thursday Night Club with Gloria Gaynor. Danny Gevirtz’ coming-of-age dark comedy I Think I'm Sick won the grand prize of Best Feature Film at Rhode Island International Film Festival, Garden State Film Festival, San Francisco Indiefest, Montreal Independent Film Festival, and Manchester (England) Film Festival (Best International Feature). Garden State Film Festival nominated me for Best Supporting Actor in a Feature for this film, alongside nominees John Cleese and Ed Begley, Jr.
THEATER highlights include starring as Orlando opposite Kate Forbes in Nashville Shakespeare Festival’s very first production, As You Like It, and playing Principal Moore in a New York production of Tigers Be Still.
TRAINING began when I was a mere 12 years old in Nashville at Ruth Sweet's (student of Lee Strasberg) The Acting Studio and Nashville Children's Theater. In Nashville as an adolescent I immersed myself in theater, tv and film, from making my professional debut in a regional touring production of Carousel, to appearing in an Amy Grant music video. I moved to Chicago for college, where I studied theater at Northwestern University, and enjoyed a semester in London at British-American Drama Academy, studying with greats like Dorothy Tutin, Frank Hauser, Norman Ayrton and Peter Jeffrey. In Los Angeles, I studied Spolin-based improv with Stephen Book and acting with the legendary Jeff Corey. These days I enjoy ongoing training and coaching with Rob McCaskill in New York.
TEACHING college is how I spent over a decade between my acting careers. Taking a hiatus from acting, I earned a second bachelor’s degree in Classics at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. After UT I moved to New York, where I worked as a freelance writer before going back to school once again and earning a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at CUNY Graduate Center. I taught Classics at Brooklyn College and English at USMA, West Point. I also tutored John Jay High School students as an Americorps volunteer and taught summer writing camps. These years took me to far-flung places intellectually and emotionally, and even geographically (an archaeological dig on the island of Crete). Highlights included taking college field trips with Brooklyn high school students, teaching Greek mythology to thousands of CUNY students, and introducing West Point cadets to the pleasure—and sometimes torture—of studying and performing Shakespeare. I also write. I'm very proud of an essay I published in The Fortnightly Review about the exhaustive and amusing search for my paternal ancestry, and I translated from French a collection of Revolutionary War prison letters, Caught in the Crossfire: The New York City Prison Letters of St. John de Crèvecoeur (currently being prepared for publication).
DIRECTING. I've also made a few films. In 2020 I released the documentary feature They Look Like Trees, a vérité film about a man who suddenly loses his sight after 60 years of perfect vision, which leads to an unlikely friendship with his neighbor. It had its first run on Amazon. Now you can view it for free on YouTube at this link. We had an exciting world premiere in October 2019 at Over-the-Rhine International Film Festival in Cincinnati, Ohio. My entry into filmmkaing was the 2011 documentary short A Neighborhood Reborn: Life in Lower Manhattan 10 Years After 9/11.