I learned the joy of hard work early on, earning a paycheck as an actor before I was ten. As a teen, I sold souvenirs at college football and basketball games, scooped ice cream, waited tables, and even sold vacuum cleaners door to door. I kept acting, in everything from commercials to dinner theater to outdoor drama, while earning a BA in Theater and English from Catawba College, where for four years I ran a sewing machine in the costume shop, fifteen hours a week. After graduation, I dressed windows, carved styrofoam, packed dried flowers, managed touring productions, set up retail showrooms, designed sets, tended bar, and (memorably) catered special events for the Hell’s Angels. By my mid-twenties, I’d started my first business, a small town shop selling baked goods and desserts based on heirloom regional recipes.

  After I sold the bakery, with the freedom to move anywhere, I chose Charlottesville, Virginia, (though I didn’t know a soul there), volunteered at a fledgling theater called Live Arts, and soon became their first full-time employee. I did everything: hung lights, sold beer, moved platforms, designed sets, wrote ad copy, and dodged creditors. Along the way I learned non-profit management, and in 1995, was named Artistic Director.

  A few years later I took on the additional role of Executive Director, responsible for both the business and the art. Though we eventually grew to ten employees, for a long time, I still did it all. Several things kept the work interesting:

-An unbeatably succinct mission: “Forging Theater and Community”. An organization as maker of both, using theater to craft community and vice-versa, in a dynamic process (that ‘forging’) where unlike things come together and are stronger.

-A commitment to true rigor, taking on the most challenging possible repertoire, while maintaining a commitment to performers from the community. Our little company presented the regional premieres of works by Edward Albee, Suzan-Lori Parks, Tony Kushner, Stephen Sondheim, George C. Wolfe, Stephen Adly Guirgis, Sarah Ruhl, Bertolt Brecht, and many others.

-The special events. We not only threw legendary Masques and Galas, but often took our shows out into the streets. From city parks and housing projects, to forgotten industrial sites, Live Arts became a theater without boundaries. We even spread our philosophy overseas, as co-producers of the American High School Theater Festival. From 1998, our team managed the work of thousands of students, teaching as we went, and spreading the belief that ordinary people can do extraordinary things. Across fourteen years with the festival, I oversaw hundreds of technical rehearsals, taught a generation of teachers that fundraising is both joyful and essential, and spoke to over 10,000 students about my passionate belief in their transformative work.

-Building for the generations to come. Helping to lead a capital campaign and design a brand new arts complex from scratch. Siting it on the city’s most prominent corner. Raising 3.6 million dollars in cash, and another million in-kind. Inspiring. Exhausting. Exhilarating.

  I stayed with Live Arts another six years after moving into our new home, coaching the community’s next generation of non-profit leaders, and making art of ridiculous ambition and deep integrity. I left in 2010, and a year later moved to Atlanta. In 2013 Live Arts asked me back and honored me in singular fashion, naming their largest theatre “The Gibson Theater”. Nice.

  Now I live in the city’s oldest extant schoolhouse with the love of my life, and our two dogs. Though I’ve enjoyed a break from intensely collaborative pursuits, I’ve kept both busy and sharp, as a consultant for branding and strategic planning, through board service, and fostering my interest in cultural anthropology by selling antiques. My major project has been intensely personal, and by far the hardest thing I’ve ever done: writing a novel, the story of an epic battle between good and evil in the American South in the years after the first World War. The first chapter is on this site, and I’d be glad to hear what you think of it.

  And as for the next chapter? Well, the most intense phase of my writing project is now done. Though more drafts, and the process of guiding it toward an audience are still ahead, I’m not by nature solitary, and crave the fray.

I’ve led hundreds of people through thousands of hours of intensely creative collaboration.

I’m unafraid of not knowing, with the patience for deep solutions.

I bring decades of training in storytelling, teamwork, creativity, inspiration, and process.

I look until I see; listen until I hear.

What’s next?

We are.