Over nine years of experience coaching creative and passionate people, with a down-to-earth commitment to equity and inclusion.

It’s great to meet you. I’m Michael.

In brief—

I am a Professional Certified Coach through the International Coach Federation and I have a Masters in Applied Theatre from the City University of New York, where I serve as a faculty member.

I have over nine years of coaching experience and I have owned my coaching practice since 2016. Most of my clients are artists or engineers. I am a “Premier Fellow Coach” at BetterUp, where I work across industries and roles, often with engineers, designers, and people managers.

Before coming to coaching, I ran an arts and education company addressing gender and sexuality for nine years. Alongside that, I worked for eight years in higher education administration, including four years as assistant director of the master’s program I now teach for.

I live with my husband in Queens, New York.

In detail—

Like many of my clients, I’m a blend of deeply empathetic and highly analytic. My life has been a journey in how to honor everything that feels true to me, in a world that often rewards picking one path over another.

In my first three years of college, I thought I would be a math teacher—I was in love with the beauty of math and very good at it. I wanted to pass that on. Then I interned as a teacher in a summer precalculus program for high school students. I realized that most teenagers don’t study math for the poetry of it (spoiler alert). They do it to pass the class. If I wanted to connect with anybody on the level of what’s meaningful and beautiful to them, I had a much better chance if I set the math aside and got to know their stories.

I studied history and anthropology. I worked with former millworkers to create a community history museum. I moved to New York to get a master’s degree in theater and education, and I taught here in the public school system. As part of my MA, I also studied how narratives of masculinity impact people’s lives—people of all genders’ lives—and created a theater company called Man Question. With Man Question, I worked for years with a group of men in a maximum-security prison, and for eight years produced our annual New Masculinities Festival.

Along the way, I burned out. I loved what I was doing, but I was always struggling to make ends meet. A mentor of mine suggested that I get coaching. I did. In coaching, I realized that I needed to slow down and take better care of the basics—I couldn’t just lead with my heart. I took a job as the Assistant Director of the master’s program that I’d attended.

I loved that job, and it gave me the experience of building a project around a vision, managing people, and working in a large organization.

Taking that job was also my coaching origin story: I was very moved that coaching had helped me see that I needed to make a change, and that it didn’t tell me what to do. I was the one who made the change.

After some years in the role, I realized that I couldn’t keep growing in it. What should I do next? Coaching stood out to me because of how much it had helped me, and because it promised to let me draw my varied experiences to connect with people on what is most meaningful to them. I got certified as a coach in the spring of 2016 and launched my business that fall. I’ve worked with people in dozens of tech companies in the US and in finance, government, arts, and non-profits.

Along the way from math class to my work on masculinity to my work in coaching, something else wonderful happened. I untangled what had made it hard to love myself and keep a good partner in my life. I met an incredibly sweet man. He’s an artist too, and we often collaborate on projects. We’re celebrating ten years of marriage this winter.

And one more thing, dear nerds: my love of math and analytical thinking did not die in this journey. The work that I do in coaching is informed by evidence-based approaches in positive psychology and organizational psychology. I continue to make art, too, and it almost always has a technical side to it now, from photography to work in VR.