Emerging Tech & New Media (Beyond Hype Cycles)

As a transdisciplinary storyteller, integrated producer, researcher, strategist and teacher, I’ve worked at the convergence of emerging tech, new media, and fan culture for decades. All informed by experience with multiple startups, some finding product-market fit and those that didn’t gifting me valuable learnings, a vast network – and lasting experiences. 

I’ve won Webbys, Cannes Lions, D&ADs and Canadian Screen Awards for my interactive documentaries. My TV docs have been seen by millions on Canada’s premier current affairs programs, been nominated for multiple Emmys, and featured in Netflix’s Top 10 in 50 countries.

On Youtube, millions of fans have engaged with my work on Tour de France cycling and New York hip-hop culture, enabling me to include fandom studies in a future of storytelling course I designed for Seneca Polytechnic. Knowledge I bring to the table as a content strategist.

My career hasn’t moved in a straight line, but along web-like rhizomes akin to the early internet. And while I’ve participated in formal R&D, I see all my work as iterative research – like feedback loops in lean startup methodology. While at leading digital studio Jam3 (now experience.monks), they called me “The Swiss Army knife” – because of this transdisciplinary experimental approach.

Here are some examples of my work, covering the full spectrum of the Gartner Hype Cycle, from hype-chasing “one and done” PR drops leveraging the Peak of Inflated Expectations, to co-creating lasting value with stakeholder communities (like fandoms) on the way up to the Plateau of Productivity. All of which I’ve distilled into my teaching and strategy.

GENERATIVE AI

• Salt XC and Quiver tapped me to produce an Anheuser-Busch InBev AI activation for Super Bowl and Coachella 2025. Powered by a Comfy.UI, it supports 72 music and sport variations to create 1 of 1s maintaining user likeness in psychedelic AI worlds.
• Concurrently, I took Curious Refuge’s AI Filmmaking course – and have kept up with the latest in AI video since participating in the second edition of Runway’s Gen:48 AI film festival in 2023.
• Providing practical context for years of research into the philosophy of AI, AI ethics, hype cycles and trends for my course on the future of storytelling at Seneca Polytechnic.

VR

• With ZeMind gaming studio, I produced an iOS app for Unit9’s Webby-winning launch experience of Meta’s Quest 3 VR headset featuring the WALKING DEAD and GHOSTBUSTERS; and created a strategy video that helped ZeMind’s human trafficking VR game secure Webby and Canadian Screen Award nods.
• While at Jam3, I directed the VR content for my Webby-winning NUCLEAR DISSENT interactive documentary, a 360 music video enabling fans to “smoke with Snoop Dogg in VR,” and co-produced the NFB’s Bear 71 VR and created the accompanying strategy video.
• For Seneca Polytechnic, I created course material on VR documentary balancing Metaverse skepticism with promising VR use cases for education and empathy.

WEB3

• Researcher, strategist and advisory board member for fandom startup Biom, founded by two former Jam3 colleagues and the head of digital gaming studio ZeMind, which provides an elegant solution to Web3’s UX/UI problem. I built on my fandom studies experience and pandemic Web3 research to further explore K-Pop fandoms in South Korea, where Web3 has moved beyond the Peak of Inflated Expectations to the Plateau of Productivity, as outlined in the Biom strategy video I created.

INTERACTIVE STORYTELLING

• I co-wrote, directed and produced Webby, Cannes Lion, D&AD and Canadian Screen Award-winning interactive documentaries SONS OF GALLIPOLI, CHANGE GOUT and NUCLEAR DISSENT during my four years at Jam3 – and strategy videos for each.
• For Seneca Polytechnic, I created and taught course material on interactive storytelling focused on the work of Alex McDowell (USC World Building Institute), Katerina Cizek (MIT Co-Creation Studio), Alan Gershenfeld (Games for Change) and Henry Jenkins (Fandom Studies and Transmedia at USC).

TRANSMEDIA CONTENT STRATEGY

• A decade before Netflix’s TOUR DE FRANCE: UNCHAINED, I co-created BEYOND THE PELOTON, a first of its kind cycling fan-access Youtube series about the Tour de France-winning Cervélo TestTeam, including a full transmedia content strategy with millions of views and a cult-like fandom that helped Cervélo grow exponentially in a few short years (and led to offers to create similar content for Tesla and Porsche).
• A brand doc series about Microsoft users on three continents, adding to my extensive work for Microsoft, with weeks spent embedded at Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond.
• Content production, direction and strategy for Makers.to on social media campaigns for Corona and VW and innovative nonprofits like MaRS and Habitat for Humanity.

RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

• I’ve researched dozens of topics for TV treatments and bibles I’ve written. For Canada’s premier current affairs programs The National and W-5, research centered on the conflicts in the Middle East, Liberia and Sierra Leone and the former Yugoslavia. For Bunim-Murray and other leading factual TV companies, research was for celebrity-driven fashion, culture and sports show bibles, some that received “flashing green lights” from major streamers, with pitches ongoing. I recently created a DRIVE TO SURVIVE-like pitch for a major sports franchise.
• While at Jam3, I researched and co-produced R&D prototypes and supporting product pitch decks and videos for Google, Mozilla, CBC Digital, Disney, and the NFB.
• I combined my learnings field producing OUR LIVING WORLD, Netflix’s 2025 Emmy-nominated Cate Blanchett-narrated nature series about the “living network that connects everything on Earth” and research into MIT Co-Creation Studio’s doctrine on “co-creating with natural systems” in an article about Natural Intelligence as an antidote to tech hype that doesn’t take the environment into account.  
• My research and communications for DD Biofuel helped raise $50 million to turn dairy waste into Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) with 80% of the carbon footprint of traditional aviation fuel. Part of a half-billion dollar business plan I helped develop based on proprietary technology from makers of carbon-neutral Vodkow vodka, winner of the highest DRAGONS DEN offer in the show’s history. Just a preview of my extensive startup experience, including my own Brooklyn-based music tech startup launched with Diplo, Pusha-T and EL-P.