About

I started in art school. New Genres program at the San Francisco Art Institute: conceptual work, critiques, studio practice. By my second year I realized I couldn't make art unless I understood what art was. Not intuitively; structurally. So I dropped out and studied formal logic instead. At UC Berkeley I worked with Paolo Mancosu, Branden Fitelson, and John MacFarlane on type theory, truth theories, set theory, proof theory. Graduated with Highest Honors and Departmental Distinction.

I went to MIT because a paper by Vann McGee frustrated me and I couldn't let it go. My dissertation, Precisifying Art Pluralism (chaired by Sally Haslanger), argues that art is a complex kind: not one thing with one definition, but a structure of related definitions that depend on each other in specific ways. The art school question, answered with the logic tools.

Now

At Cegos US I'm a Senior Learning & Development Consultant doing high-touch, bespoke work with C-suite leaders on the future of work, design thinking, and experience design. The work is about how people inside organizations encounter change: how they learn, how they resist, how you design the conditions for them to move.

I'm co-founding dyad with Joshua Kampa: relational infrastructure for human-AI work. Most AI collaboration tools treat agents as isolated minds. We're building the layer where the relationship between agents is persistent, structured, and owned by the people in it.

At Artist Commons I teach the Philosophy of Art to early- and mid-career visual artists: helping them build frameworks for understanding their practices and the vocabulary to talk about them. It's the class I wish I'd had at SFAI.

In the studio I work across painting, digital processes, and pen plotting: hand to scanner to screen to vintage HP 7475a and back again. The work investigates self-construction: how identity accumulates and erodes, how we know ourselves through relation. Vertical Crypto Art Residency (6th Cohort, 2023). Shown in Stockholm, Zagreb, Valencia, New York; collected internationally; featured in Tracing the Line (Vetro Editions).

Teaching and public philosophy

At the University of Rhode Island I was Senior Lecturer in Philosophy for several years. I taught ethics and critical thinking to hundreds of undergraduates, designed a public lecture series on Ethics and Big Data, co-designed the Ethics Throughout the Curriculum workshop for faculty, and worked as a Faculty Development Affiliate helping faculty across the university become better at teaching to adult learners. I also gave a TEDx talk on what it actually means to take personal responsibility for the climate crisis.

In 2019 I co-founded Philosophers for Sustainability with Eugene Chislenko. We wrote the APA's Good Practices Guide on sustainability and ran the 2+1 Campaign (675 signatories to move one annual conference online). As a graduate student I taught myself web development to build the Underrepresented Philosophers Directory; the APA maintains it now.