I haven’t got any plans for the future, except to stop — so that the mind… you know, the mind needs time to recover.

You need to give yourself a lot of fallow time, I think.

We’re all encouraged in this business to go: ‘What’s next? What’s next? What’s next?’ And it inspires, I think, a form of greed — not financial greed, but greed for overstimulation.

And, I think it’s time to just look at a tree, you know, never mind anything else.

— Emma Thompson, 1996

I live in liminality.

A career spent in the space between art and commerce, threading artistic desire through audience demand.

A life spent in oscillation, enacting a postmodern transumanza: (re)rooted in Abruzzo, born thus bound to America, drawn back and again to the west coast of Clare, and yet… called still to wander, to wonder, to weave.

From my home in Tocco, I am nestled between mountain and sea, vibrant village and vast expanse, home and away. To the north lies Gran Sasso, to the south the Majella. Their surrounding heights encircle my world, a demarcation of here and beyond. Their silhouettes mark the passing days; I watch them shift, at dusk, at dawn.

And then there’s Clare, my wild west. I walk the fringes of Atlantic coast, adrift like seaweed lulling in the receding tides. I lose myself to the scent of the sea, the sparse stretches of stone and sky, the swift sounds of jigs and reels, their rhythms enlivening the slow pace of my solitudinal residency.

These are the thresholds I traverse these days.

Before this, I’d spent the last 13 or some odd years guiding global editorial organizations and curation strategy, and driving content and format innovations that impact at scale, across music, audio, and entertainment.

At Spotify (2013–2021), I built and led global editorial strategy, co-created the “algotorial” model (a hybrid format for scaling human curation through machine learning) and Global Curation Groups, shifted how the industry pitches music to streaming companies (re: “the pitch tool”), wrote the company’s first global editorial playbook, ran a leading playlist portfolio of 300+ global and local brands (including personal faves like Peaceful Piano, Morning/Afternoon/Evening Acoustic, Wild + Free, Roots Rising, Swagger, Post-Trad, Southern Gothic, Songs to Sing in the Car (no shame)…), “discovered” and supported artists like Hozier, Dermot Kennedy, and Phoebe Bridgers, helped launch Spotify’s non-music audio business, and got stuck into Hack Culture, among other things.

At Twitch, I led music programming and developed interactive formats at the intersection of music and gaming. I was lured there by André Bazin, and his Myth of Total Cinema, privileged to leap from theory to practice in the promise of interactivity and live video. Most recently, as VP of Strategy and A&R at Nettwerk Music Group, I developed a department dedicated to brand and content strategy for the 40-year-old company and its global roster of 200+ artists, designing and deploying the label’s first ever brand strategy (from voice and values and a 70+ page brand kit to governance and asset management), launched a net-new artist development framework, co-founded Goodwerks (a social-impact imprint that garnered coverage in Stereogum and Pitchfork with its first volume in support of the Abortion Care Network), and signed and supported artists like Paris Paloma (my first!), Amistat, Sarah Julia, Joshua Burnside, Humbird, Lydia Luce, Ciaran Lavery, Fionn Regan, and so many more beloved talents.

The constant undercurrent of all that work is a deep reverence for curation as a mode of creativity paired with an abiding deference to audience desire and delight.

Both were born out of my PhD in Literature and Cinema Studies from Northeastern University, I honed my craft across the fields of Contemporary Irish Poetry, Film Theory (1890–Present), and 20th- and 21st-century Transatlantic Adaptation Studies, with a focus on Cognitive Poetics and the Digital Humanities. While I interrupted my academic trajectory, pausing my scholarly discourse to instead pursue applied creative technology innovation and global arts programming, I’ve been thrilled to see my doctoral work cited in places like Adaptation (Oxford University Press) and Literature/Film Quarterly.

Some would say I am on a “sabbatical.” I would not. I prefer to think of this era as a giving in to fallow time… a period spent indulging in a self-directed, slow artist residency… or, even, a study on being [sans Heidegger].

I’ve delved into a deliberate withdrawal from the digital cultural economy to return to something personal and present, to seek resonance and renewal. And so, I built a home, in Abruzzo. I go away to Clare. I am slowly returning to a language my mind has always yearned for, being welcomed into a community that holds me, and connecting to waters and lands that know me, make me.

I have been walking, writing, wondering… uncovering the palimpsests of place.

Today, I’m in Abruzzo, amidst her serpent cults and brigands, her witches and werewolves, her castles of stone and sky, her evening passeggiata and her midday pausa, when the cafés fill with the sounds of scopa and briscola. Her rhythms are now my own. Her stories tell mine.

I’m so fully immersed in this chapter, yet open to the surprise of the next.…