Raised in extreme poverty in Oakland & Berkeley, California.

At age 15, I co-founded Youth Comix Group, with several friends. It wasn’t successful but it was an introduction to storytelling. After a stint of sign-painting and murals, I was introduced to marionettes at a bohemian party, joining a puppet troupe in 1998. I fell in love with the engineering and complex woodworking of marionettes.

However, information on how to build marionettes was extremely difficult to come by in the mostly pre-internet era. My early puppets were built using 7 photocopied pages from a 70 year-old rare book in the reference section of the Berkeley public library.

Over the next 25 years I would make it my mission to lower the barrier-of-entry to this amazing art form, by creating templates, posters and videos, detailing the step-by-step process—I’ve tinkered endlessly with creating the ideal, beginner-friendly approach and teach the next generation of marionette storytellers.