MY BACKGROUND

Documentary Filmmaker
I’ve been making documentary films for over a decade – which is mostly learning to ask questions that reveal truths and complex stories then weave them into coherent narratives. I bring this listening skill to my operational work. Looking back at my first documentary about how social media was changing human behavior, Life in Perpetual Beta (2011), it comes as no shock to me now that I have taken this tact as a consultant –  my first film was born out of a curiosity about how human behavior changes when the systems they operate within change around them.

Nonprofit Executive Director
I founded and led what became a 5,000-member organization for women in tech, navigating the unique challenges of mission-driven work: stakeholder management, values-led decision-making, board dynamics, and financial sustainability. For me, this work was humbling, as I was an untested leader with passion and vision who was thrust into the spotlight as a change-maker but unaware of how to sustain or manage that change. This is where I learned how to build a sustainable organization by asking for help. And while Chicago Women Developers closed its doors in 2020, I am still forever in awe of what this team built both with and without me.

Tech Entrepreneur & Startup Founder

Chief Technical Officer, Chief Marketing Officer, Chief Executive Officer, I’ve tried on every hat in the start-up tech ecosystem, but I found I was most comfortable in the Chief Operating Officer role – deeply involved in the inner-workings of organizational strategy and growth, usually without having to be thrust into spotlight. I’ve built companies from ideas to reality, scaling them from seed to staffed to sold. Having been part of both bootstrapped and venture backed teams I understand the pressures to perform, but I’ve learned my preference is to build the back-end infrastructure that allowed innovative ideas to scale, whether pivoting under pressure or entering new markets.

MBA with an emphasis in Organizational Psychology
I have the theoretical foundation to back up my practical experience. But more importantly, because I attended university after building so many organizations, the education was more than just theory to me, it was a way to back-solve for my past failures, to understand why my dumb luck worked, and to give a name to many intuitive moves my teams made that were right.

What all of this adds up to: I understand that organizations are living systems, and that systems and the people within them change each other.

The documentary filmmaker taught me to listen before I build. The nonprofit leader taught me humility and how to sustain through uncertainty. The startup operator taught me how to scale under pressure with limited resources. The organizational psychologist gave me language for why things work or why my “dumb luck” actually wasn’t luck at all.

I don’t just bring operational expertise. I bring years of experience across technology, storytelling, and human systems. I know how to read what’s really happening in your organization, build infrastructure that fits your actual reality, and transfer that knowledge so your team owns it.

This is what informs my fractional work: not just knowing how to build systems, but understanding the stories those systems tell, and making sure they’re telling the right ones.