Born and raised in New Orleans, the son of a Cuban refugee, I spent my formative years drawing, noodling on cheap guitars, and painting murals of local hip hop stars on the sides of inner-city record stores.

Since then? I’ve spent my adult life in a joyful, chaotic mix of creative pursuits — some successful, some gloriously questionable, all formative.

I came of age during the last gasp of MTV’s hair metal era (my parents were surprisingly chill about a four-year-old mainlining MTV). In addition to an unfortunate interest in Dave Lee Roth’s solo career exploits, I fell headfirst into an obsession with the INXS video for “What You Need” and a battered Beach Boys Greatest Hits cassette. Around the same time, Nintendo hit the scene and melted my small, impressionable brain. The blocky visual language, the 8-bit music, the labyrinthine worlds of Metroid — I didn’t know it then, but it planted the seed for my fascination with digital design.

I was torn between science and art — so naturally, I decided to do both. I earned a hefty scholarship to Washington University in St. Louis, planning to major in art while knocking out pre-med requirements on the side. My advisor said it was impossible. I assured them I was that rare unicorn with a multi-colored mane who would defy the odds. Reader, I was not a unicorn.

Eventually, art won out (to my father’s horror), and I ditched medicine to dive headfirst into visual communication.

After college, I moved back to New Orleans for a couple years of playing in bands while I cut my teeth as a junior designer at a local college. I got my portfolio together, landed a job and moved to NYC at the first chance I could. There, I was introduced to the nascent field of digital marketing at Modem Media, which had just subsequently been bought out be Digitas.

In the background I played percussion and synths in indie dance-punk bands that were, to put it gently, commercially unsuccessful. But it was the magical, pre-high rise days of Williamsburg, so it was a lot of fun.

And then, what started as a one-off performance art joke morphed into Faux Punk, a Daft Punk cover band that accidentally turned profitable and took me on tour across the country. The lesson? Pretending to make music is way more profitable than actually making music.

Somewhere along the way, I sold an animated TV show about El Chapo to Warner Brothers — pitched as Everybody Loves Raymond, but in Sinaloa. It was awesome. It never saw the light of day.

I spent too many late nights illustrating and producing animated shorts, sometimes for Comedy Central, sometimes purely for the stubborn love of it.

And through it all, I’ve maintained a painting practice good enough to land art residencies, which keep me honest and creatively stretched.

Over two decades, I’ve built a creative career that zig-zags across big-name agencies, boutique studios, and tech companies. I co-founded Gravy Boat Regatta, a Brooklyn-based studio that evolved from entertainment shop to boutique ad agency to crypto-favorite branding partner.

As Creative Director at Ro, a telehealth unicorn, I led the brand’s transformation from promo-heavy, transactional marketing to bold, top-of-funnel storytelling — spanning MLB partnerships, product launches, and national campaigns.

Most recently, at Nom Nom (now part of Mars), I led a full brand overhaul, built the creative and marketing teams, launched national campaigns, revamped the website, and — yes — attended an unreasonable number of dog shoots, Pomeranians included.

Along the way, I’ve worked across just about every medium and deliverable: UX/UI design, animation, TVCs, experiential, Figma, live events. Some personal career highlights? Animating the pylon at the Indy 500, live-tweeting Bud Light’s Super Bowl campaign, writing and directing national TV spots about erectile dysfunction that were actually funny (even if Disney/ABC needed a last-minute edit), and casting Kristin Chenoweth to sell dog food.

These days, I’m a dad of two — which means that when I’m not leading creative teams, I’m painting, making silly animations, trying to entertain (or survive) my kids, and cooking up something spicy and Creole with an irresponsible amount of butter.