[1] He began studying piano privately at the age of eight, and spent his high school years attending the Chicago Academy for the Arts, from which he graduated with the senior award for excellence in theatre.

He spent his first year writing, directing and performing in a weekly, half-hour sketch comedy called Possibly Blank, for which he occasionally wrote original music.

Discovering he could use editing technology to mimic the visual characteristics of the 1920s and 30s films which had influenced him, he began developing a modern, dreamlike spin on comedia del arte in his work, creating the limited series Faces (1996), the access television movies Candy Town (1995), Alphabet Garden[2] (1997), and various shorts including Accidents of Bread and Cheese (1998) and Missing Children (1998).

His fifty-minute work, The Private Pennies of His Merry Dobbs[3] (1998), was the "Innovative" category winner in the Alliance for Community Media's 1999 Hometown Video Festival Awards.

In 2017, he set to work on the script for a Candy Town web series, recording a soundtrack with his Chicago Avenue Films co-producer Joshua Eckhardt and various former members of the live act.