Welcome, friend!

professional info: linkedin

Everything else:

Raised in rural Minnesota 15 minutes by car from the farm my mother was born and grew up on, I was brought up in a world that fostured conscientiousness, hard work, and creativity. At a very young age my father and a friend, along with help from family, started a winery at this very farm, introducing me early on to the world of winemaking and hospitality. Apart from extensive time outside camping and fishing as a family, my siblings and I were always playing a different sport each season, mostly running and basketball for me. We also had required piano lessons from 1st-4th grade, so there was always music in the house, but I also added in trumpet, drumline, and guitar. In addition to sports and music, I was in theater throughout middle and high school, heavily involved in student council and National Honors Society, and participated in our robotics club. Outside of school, I was in Boy Scouts from 1st until 12th grade, when I obtained my Eagle Scout, and when it came to jobs, I was always helping the family winery, worked at the local grocery store, and lifeguarded at a small water park in town. As for art, it can easily be said, was and has been a continuous focus in my life. With my father being my original teacher (through the many home-improvement projects I helped him with), I was always drawing, took every art class available at school, and pursued extracurricular art outside of class.

The summer after high school, 2016 for context, I embarked on a cross-state run to fundraise for the non-profit charity: water. It took me 41 separate runs over the course of 21 days totalling 212.71 miles. My goal was $5,000, described as the amount to fund a "water project" that supports a community of people without access to clean water, but I finished the run with $5,640. Attempting and completing this endeavor was and has been one of my greatest accomplishments (undoubtedly with the immense help of countless people, primarily being my mom), especially having been for charity: water, a company who's mission I deeply believe in and have followed since before the run. 

That fall, I went to college at the University of MN Duluth where I double majored in Graphic Design and Communication. While there, I was part of the honors program, a welcome week leader for incoming freshmen, and worked in the on campus photo studio. I also continued running through my sophomore year, ending on Grandma's Marathon, a scenic 26.2 miles along the shore of Lake Superior. At the beginning of my sophomore year, I started working at Doucette's Special Events, a job that gifted me with a mountain of experience in work ethic, leadership, and responsibility, through their trust in allowing me to overhaul much of their branding materiels in order to create a more cohesive brand image. Apart from that, I took away many life skills in manual labor, the operation and maintenance of trucks and trailers, and the ins and outs of running a small, but very busy, business. I spent the spring semester of my junior year abroad in Florence, Italy, a place that allowed me to further explore art through their rich history and body of museums. Covid hit during my 4th year and much of my final schooling was online. With this surplus of time at home, I dug deeper into various mediums of art with my roommates at the time, also artists. We also played cards almost every day, went for many hikes, spent time at the beach, and became quite good at darts. At the beginning of my 5th year I also switched jobs to bussing and serving at a local bar and grille, my first paid introduction to the hospitality industry and my income for the remainder of my time in Duluth.

After graduating in spring of 2021 I spent the rest of my summer and early fall in Duluth with close friends, all of us trying to figure out what our post college moves would be in a world still very much experiencing a pandemic. Come September, one of my friends suggested applying at Vail for the season, which I saw as a good opportunity to learn how to snowboard better, having just picked it up the previous season. It also offered me some extra time with two cousins living in Colorado. While in Vail, I made plans to travel up to rural Alaska the following summer to work as a rafting guide at a small fishing and rafting company, the connection coming from my former GM at the restaurant. As part of the job, I studied for and obtained my Wilderness First Responder, which included an in person 5 day instruction, and in late May drove up to Alaska with a friend where we also earned our Swiftwater Rescue certification. Three months of living out of a tent, sharing a camp with 6 others, and being in the wilderness 24/7 was one of my most memorable opportunities to date. I encountered life and death scenarios, was responsible for the lives of others in my raft, and learned how to catch, gut, filet, and cook some of the best salmon in the world.

Following the drive back from Alaska, which we detoured for 15 days down the PCH through Vancouver to San Francisco, over to Yosemite, up to Salt Lake, across the Badlands and home to Minnesota (5,531 miles), I repacked my car and headed back for Colorado where an empty bedroom in my cousin's house awaited. Not surprisingly, I was short on money at this point. Covid had offered me some financial freedom from my student loans being on hold to explore some other interests, but seasonal work doesn't usually pay well, so I felt the need to hit the ground running looking for a job as soon as I arrived in Denver. Having had a memorable experience in hospitality, and having a growing interest in the cocktail world, I figured I could get a job at a bar, get an income stream going, learn more about liquor, and pursue the seemingly more lengthy process of finding something within the creative field that fell more in line with my undergraduate degrees. Over the following 2 weeks, I walked into 38 different bars, restaurants, and distilleries with my resume in hand looking for a job. I got three offers, the first being Williams and Graham. At the time I was happy to just have a job and thought I would then start the process of searching for something else, but shortly after I began there I realized just how much I could learn by sticking around for a while. I then made a pact with myself that I would work my way up from host and barback, to server, to bartender, bartend for a year, then get back to pursuing a creative career. While I've stuck to that path, I've also felt an evergrowing drive to continue living a creative life, not that working at a world class cocktail bar isn't creative. My time outside work has largely involved working on illustration, only escalating since moving to Denver. To say that I've grown and learned while at WG is an understatement. It's two and a half years I wouldn't trade for the best creative job. However, it isn't a lifelong career path for me and having finished out my plan of working my way up to bartender, and bartending for a year, I'm ready to embark on my creative career, allowing what I've been focused on outside work to take a larger part in my life.