I am a toy inventor, product designer and software engineer. I hope to make some magic that sparks a smile and maybe even a... Wow! My studio is in Jersey City, New Jersey.
My most popular toy BUTTERFLY IN A JAR sold over one million units and won second place for "Best Toy" and an award of excellence when it was introduced at the Tokyo Toy Fair. The Butterfly embodies my goal to create products that surprise, often with an element of magic or transformation, but that hide the notion of trick or complexity. The Butterfly project drew on my background in puppetry, magic, special effects, and software.
I hold a B.F.A. from New York University Film School. After graduation, an early background as a professional child actor in the theatre led me back to live performance.
Along with Alice Farley and Skye Leith, I co-founded the company TripleVision. Together our trio conceived, designed and performed cabaret shows that blended live characters, puppetry, dance, elaborate costumes and magic. In addition to performing, I invented and built special effects and illusions that explored the integration of live characters with magic, working under the philosophy that magic and effects should evolve from character and action, not as mere trick.
TripleVision was signed by International Creative Management (ICM) and represented by the legendary agent Bill Barnes -- Tennessee Williams's agent. TripleVision co-headlined at the Las Vegas Hilton in the Bal du Moulin Rouge review, at the Sands and Castle casinos in Atlantic City and in other venues around the country. We performed often in collaboration with world renown extraordinary magician Jeff McBride, whose generosity and support contributed to TripleVision's success.
Guy Laliberté, founder of Cirque du Soleil, saw our show in Las Vegas and hired us to collaborate with Cirque over several years.
I was a magic consultant on Doug Henning's Broadway production of Merlin. I conceived and designed effects for Peter Allen's Broadway production of Legs Diamond and Elizabeth Swados's Off-Broadway workshop production of Houdini.
It was actually an illusion that I designed for a friend's work of dance theatre, that I then developed into a product, which brought me back to an early love: making things.
My first commercial product, ORBITON, received a patent and was licensed to Andrew Lloyd Webber's Really Useful Games Company. The ORBITON, expanded from 6 inches to over 15 feet, was used in the permanent exhibit "The Body Zone" at the London Millennium Dome Exposition in 2000.
Along the way I also connected with software as another way of inventing. I architected and developed enterprise-wide applications at investment firms Lazard Frères & Co. and Credit Suisse. In the early DotCom era I was a partner and senior developer at ROI Lab, a startup which created online software and desktop tools for the investment banking and staffing industries.
I have been awarded four patents.