Growing up in the mountains of western Montana, I was on my own and began working full-time at age 16. In my travels in those days, I learned valuable and common sense lessons and ethics as a cowboy, sawmill worker, logger, and miner. Later, in addition to working full-time, I continued my education and over the years earned undergraduate and graduate degrees. Like many, I was bitten by the acting bug in high school and have been acting in some way, shape, or form ever since. In addition to acting, during my “day job” career, I’ve been fortunate to hold several executive positions in industry and government, high-level administrator and faculty positions in higher education, and now own and operate three successful small businesses.

I love Meisner’s definition of acting: “The ability to live truthfully under given imaginary circumstances.” From growing up a simple country boy to working within Fortune 500 companies, I have been blessed with the opportunity to bring to my acting this diverse and multi-faceted background, which helps me create rich, authentic, and real characters. Whether I’m playing a cowboy or a corporate exec, a detective or a derelict, an everyman or a nobody, I have been able to draw from somewhere in my life and my imagination the ingredients to create truth and honesty in the moment. My collective experiences with all types of people, in all types of settings, combined with a vivid imagination, makes acting a true joy.

Becoming an actor (and I intentionally use the word becoming in its strictest sense of “growing into”) continues to be a joyful, enriching, challenging, humbling, wondrous, and sometimes heartbreaking journey. But as Homer, the traveler of all travelers reminds us, “The journey’s the thing.” My journey of acting is fraught with danger and opportunity, with ups and downs, with the thrill of applause and the agony of criticism, of painful introspection and brilliant insight. But you know what? I wouldn’t have it any other way.