I was raised in the small town of Wilton, Connecticut until the age of fourteen, when my family moved to Bangkok, Thailand. I attended the International School there and traveled extensively throughout Thailand and Asia. Learned to speak Thai fluently, became interested in Buddhism, and at seventeen, was ordained as a novice priest by His Holiness the Supreme Patriarch of Thailand. The event was widely reported as I was the first foreign novice in history, the first novice ever ordained by a Patriarch, and the first foreigner ever ordained by a Patriarch. As a priest, I traveled to Chiengmai, Thailand's largest northern city, and lived at Wat Chedi Luang, built in the 1200's when Chiengmai was the capital of an independent kingdom. The abbot of the temple took me on a number of trips to small temples and an enclave of hermitic monks in the mountains near Burma, in the heart of the Golden Triangle - formed by the adjoining borders of Laos, Burma, and Thailand - one of the world's largest opium producing regions.

At eighteen, I returned to the United States and attended Pomfret School in Connecticut from which I graduated Valedictorian and received the first Annual Reverend Thomas B. Hanson Dirty Dog Award for Cunning and Valor on the Playing Field. Before college, I spent a year in Bangkok working as a newspaper reporter and photographer for the Nation. Surrounded by machine guns, I was one of the first reporters to interview the representatives of Bangladesh when it claimed independence. My 1972 story breaking the news that the U.S. 7th Fleet was withdrawing from the Indian Ocean, thereby ceding the eastern end of the strategic arc running from the Middle East to Southeast Asia, was carried by Associated Press worldwide.

During the next years back in the United States, I toured and made an album with Big Lost, a rock band, worked as a carpenter in Big Sur, and while attending Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, received a grant to make an ethnographic study and film of a Blue Meo hilltribe village in the Golden Triangle in Thailand. I then enrolled at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena from which I graduated First in Class and Magna Cum Laude with a BFA in film production.

I have produced, written, edited and directed award winning documentaries, commercials, and projects such as all the motion picture special effects for the Haunted House and Pirates of the Caribbean at EuroDisneyland. While working, I taught film production and advertising design for fifteen years at Art Center, and later at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco where I served as Chairman of the Advertising Design Department and founded their Motion Picture Department.

I now live in Los Angeles, continuing to work as a filmmaker, advertising designer, composer, and writer.