Ever since I can remember I was in some sort of music class or lesson. I started out with a baby music class called “Kindermusik” and I had a little drum and glockenspiel to play on at home. I guess my parents think I took a liking to it so I started piano lessons when I was 3 or 4. As I grew through elementary school I continued onward till in 4th grade we had the orchestra/band demo day at school. I saw all the instruments in front of me and I could only really think about the cello afterwards, and in my little tiny brain the only reason was because it rhymed with jello. So I went home and asked if I could stop my piano lessons and start playing cello in the school orchestra, and for some reason my parents said yes.

Come that next fall I officially joined the school orchestra and thought my piano days were over. I then played in the school orchestra and was proudly a cello player only till about halfway through high school. I had started to do crew for our theatre department and made friends with people from all over the school, but mainly other parts of the music department, mainly the jazz band. I then had the thought, well…I don’t see any cellos in Jazz so I guess I won’t do that, and continued on in theatre, starting to play in the pit in my high school shows on cello. I also at some point decided I was going to be a music educator and teach high school orchestra, so I needed to start my training early and began asking if I could take instruments home over weekends and try to learn them. So I started noodling around poorly on anything I could get my hands on and eventually decide by my senior year I was going to be in the jazz band, and the one instrument I couldn’t take home was a bass so what better way to learn than on the spot. So as I went on my senior year trying to figure out a new instrument in a new genre, I decided to start going arrangements of songs for string quartet, another one of those skills I knew I was going to have to learn. So I started doing poor arrangements of songs to try and practice my writing and when everything was said and done I was enrolled for Music Education at Elmhurst University!

About a month into my first semester freshman year I was over the eduction route, but knew I still wanted to do music. So I dropped my Music Ed major and switched over to Music Theory and Composition, having no idea how to write and never having written before. The next 4 years of school became a joy as deepened my knowledge of Theory, began to find my own style and voice, and of course picked up a couple of more odd ball instruments along the way, this time mainly guitar. As I went on I started to play in the pit for my colleges productions of shows, but also started to hear about this thing called music production and audio engineering, and knowing I have a mechanical mind and have always been a little bit of a gear head I decided to do some investigation on all this and made the purchase of an Ableton Live license and just fell in love with working in the DAW. I started to work more on pop tunes and electronic music until I discovered music for the screen and really felt like I could blend this newfound love of DAW work into the concert music world I came from and still love. I then decided to really focus on the production side of my work and started taking recording lessons in the studio at school, and my gear head brain just exploded. I truly loved getting to know all the outboard gear and mics in the studio, and learning about routing and not only sound design and mixing but studio design and work flow, all the behind the scene stuff to make a studio work.

So then all of a sudden the end of my Junior year rolls around and I need to start planning out my senior capstone composition recital, and in trying to think of what to try and put together with all the things I’ve already written and my interests I decided it was the perfect time in my life to try and write a musical. I wanted to really push myself and do something I hadn’t seen anyone else do during my time at school so I got to work on “Big Foot: A Small Step Forward”. So that whole summer I started writing song after song, knowing nothing about dramaturgy or how to write a script and asked a lot of friends for a lot of favors to not only put this show on, but record a full cast album for it. I worked on tracks and played all the things I could in, programmed so many interments, and recorded so many takes until in the spring of 2023 we had a 1 night only production of it as my senior capstone. I was so proud to have a group of people get excited about the silly thing I was making and honored that people wanted to come watch it. Then it was over, I had musical I had just spent a year of my life on, no idea what I was going to do with my life, so I started looking at grad programs for all sorts of things, music composition, audio production, etc. but there was only one program I could find that offered a Master’s degree for musical writing. So I decided to take my demos, and poorly written libretto, if you could even call it that, and send it over to NYU Tisch’s Graduate Musical Theatre Writing program, where someone decided through all the mess of my first show there was something there. So I graduated Elmhurst University in spring of 2023 heading to NYU in the fall!

After now just spending the past two years of my life finally learning what a libretto is and how a plot works I can say I’m beyond overjoyed to have been apart of NYU Tisch’s Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program (Cycle 34). I have met so many wonderful mentors who continually pushed me outside of my comfort zone and allowed be to keep re-defining myself as an artist. I have been very honored to meet so many wonderful, crazy, strange, and talented collaborators and theatre artists who allowed me to be a strange, crazy, and passionate creative. I have been so lucky to also continue my work in studios, resigning and building out the recording space for the program, as well as hop on and join other independent projects during my time there. Most of all, I am lucky to have found an amazing collaborator, Spencer Lynn, to write my thesis show “The Sun Rises” with, among so many other shows in the works!