I’ve spent decades developing policy tools and funding programs, building pop-up space programs and cultural space education programs. I’ve launched over a dozen cultural spaces, from tiny galleries to mammoth cultural centers in old warehouses and historic train stations.

My practice directly engages with cultural communities to identify a market’s challenges and its opportunities, and collaboratively design strategic solutions that bridge the distance between challenge and opportunity.

Most recently I created Seattle's Cultural Space Agency and served as its executive director for three years. Prior to launching the Space Agency, I served for nearly a decade as the City of Seattle’s Cultural Space Liaison, building a nationally unique body of work around cultural space. I was the first director of the Storefronts Seattle program, the largest pop-up cultural space incubator program in the country. I founded and ran two contemporary arts centers, including Consolidated Works, a 25,000 square-foot multidisciplinary center. I was made an honorary member of the American Institute of Architects, and received an Award of Merit from the American Planning Association. I am the only two-time winner of the Seattle Mayor’s Arts Award.

In 2017 I led the team that published the City of Seattle’s CAP Report: 30 Ideas for the Creation, Activation, and Preservation of Cultural Space. In it we presented 30 ideas, generated in partnership with the City of Seattle and community stakeholders, to create a roadmap for the preservation and ongoing creation of the spaces that make a city interesting. It’s these spaces that helped make Seattle the fastest-growing large city in the US for a decade.

Cultural space is the literal square footage underneath all cultural activity. It’s the six square feet of sidewalk underneath the street-busking performer; it’s the 6,000 square-foot concert hall to which they might aspire. Cultural space is under the artist’s studio and the record shop; it's under the nightclub, the theater and the rehearsal room. Cultural space is the underlying basis of the entire creative economy. Along with the creative act itself, cultural space is pretty much the only other absolute requirement for cultural activity.

The success of cultural space in a neighborhood makes that neighborhood more valuable. As neighborhood values increase, those cultural spaces typically become vulnerable to displacement. They call it “The SoHo Effect.” My work asks, "How can we increase the likelihood that emerging cultural spaces survive their own success?"

The presence of cultural spaces in neighborhoods has been shown to correlate with increased public safety, with increased property value, with higher WalkScores and the presence of symbiotic businesses like coffeeshops and hotels. Cultural spaces are the magical geese that lay the “golden eggs” of property value and neighborhood vibrancy. I work with cities, with philanthropic partners, with developers, and with the cultural spaces themselves, to protect these Golden Geese. The goal is not to save cultural spaces one-by-one but to move an entire sector towards stability, towards predictability, towards agency.

For more than a decade my practice has centered communities of color, with particular emphasis on working with Black and Indigenous communities and organizations. Cultural spaces in most major markets dramatically underrepresent historically marginalized communities of all types. Working to secure the stability for these communities to thrive in place has been central to my practice.