I’m an award-winning journalist based in Milan, Italy, where I cover environmental and tax policy for Bloomberg Industry Group and write about all things Italy for the Los Angeles Times. My photos and essays have also appeared in the Columbia Journalism Review, Business Insider and more. A graduate of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Journalism and Loyola Law School, Los Angeles, I’ve lectured on journalism and law at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles and the University of Bologna in Italy.
As a writer, I’m happiest when I’m distilling complex issues into clean, compelling narratives that help people understand and engage with the world around them. I live in constant pursuit of beautiful sentences and evocative images.
As an editor, I love helping original thinkers present their ideas in ways that resonate with new audiences. My goal is to help my clients meet the profession’s highest standards while still maintaining their unique voices. As Miles Davis once said: “Man, sometimes it takes a long time to sound like yourself.”
I started writing professionally for my hometown newspaper in Indiana at age 17, then moved to Los Angeles to earn a B.A. in Journalism at the University of Southern California. Convinced at first that I wanted to be a science journalist, I spent a year interning with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. During my sophomore year, I attended the World Press Photo Exhibit and became hooked on visual storytelling, though I remain a far better writer than photographer. After graduating — with honors, if that matters — I started my career as a breaking news reporter and editor in San Francisco. For about a year, I worked the Saturday and Sunday night graveyard shifts (11 p.m. to 7 a.m.), and could recite the homicide rates for all nine counties of the SF Bay Area.
In between breaking news pieces, I found myself gravitating to stories about law, policy and politics. I covered Pres. Barack Obama’s West Coast re-election campaign launch, and spent six months producing an award-winning series about domestic sex trafficking of minors. I was reading court cases on the weekends to enrich my reporting, so I (naively?) figured I might as well attend law school to gain an area of expertise. (Full disclosure: this was made financially possible thanks to tuition remission and moving back in with my parents.)
At Loyola Law School, Los Angeles, I learned the difference between power (politics) and justice (law, when executed properly). I served as Chief Articles Editor for a law review and became fascinated with international legal systems. I interned overseas for the U.S. State Department and traveled as much as I could, convinced that after graduating I would need to settle down, get serious and embrace convention.
Instead, two weeks after I sat for the California Bar Exam in the summer of 2014, I moved to Italy on a Fulbright fellowship and never left. This site showcases much of what I’ve been up to since then. If you like what you see, I’m always happy to connect via email, on social media, or through my mailing list.
