Narrative Architect | Cultural Strategist | Writer
What I Do
I help people and organizations diagnose and rebuild the narrative systems that shape their public identity, funding potential, and long-term impact. My work goes far beyond messaging — I identify structural misalignments between mission, story, and audience perception, then build narrative frameworks that create clarity, coherence, and strategic direction.
Who I Am
I began as a writer, but my work has always operated beneath the surface of storytelling. I don’t just describe events — I diagnose the systems, patterns, and power structures that shape them. Over time, that instinct became a parallel practice: helping artists, executives, creatives, and institutions understand the deeper logic of who they are. My consulting and my writing are the same work expressed through different forms — narrative architecture.
Who I Help
I work with artists, organizational leaders, founders, and cultural institutions navigating transformation — people who need clarity at the structural level. My clients come to me when they are outgrowing an old identity, scaling into a larger vision, or preparing to engage more powerfully with the world.
Explore selected case studies.
How We Can Work Together
Case Studies
These selected case studies illustrate the structural narrative issues I diagnose and the transformations my clients experience across arts, cultural, and community organizations.
A community arts organization leasing a multi-use cultural space faced chronic instability, unclear positioning, and a fragmented narrative that weakened their ability to secure funding to purchase the building. I diagnosed systemic misalignment between the founders’ true origin story, their public messaging, and the actual community impact unfolding inside the space. Their original story framing was too abstract and activity-focused to communicate value in funding environments. I identified their core narrative engine—intergenerational transformation through accessible creative space—and rebuilt their story architecture around concrete community outcomes and capital investment logic. This reframing clarified their identity, elevated their perceived value, and positioned them to make a more compelling case for ownership and long-term stability.
A culturally rooted gallery had strong community presence but consistently avoided sharing the founders’ origin stories and the lived experiences that gave rise to the organization. Their narrative focused on programming and events rather than the deeper motivations and risks they had taken to create the space, which limited emotional resonance with donors and institutional partners. Through structural analysis, I identified this suppressed origin narrative as the core barrier to narrative power and long-term growth. I provided a framework for integrating personal story with institutional mission in a way that preserved dignity, managed vulnerability, and increased relational trust. Although they chose not to fully adopt this deeper alignment, the diagnostic revealed the real reason their story could not scale beyond activity-level descriptions.
An emerging healing-arts center struggled with narrative vagueness and mission language that relied on inaccessible philosophical phrasing rather than strategic clarity. Their true impact—community healing, cultural- and trauma-informed engagement, and transformation through ancestral-rooted healing practices—was never structurally articulated. The public narrative emphasized what they did, not what changed because of their work, making it difficult for funders and partners to understand their value. I reframed their identity around stakeholder transformation, clarified their developmental outcomes, and built a structured narrative logic they could use across grants, partnerships, and public communication. This gave them a repeatable framework for explaining who they are, what they do, and why it matters.
A Somali-led arts and culture organization—one of the first of its kind on the West Coast—had deep community trust and significance but lacked a coherent narrative to match its impact. Their work spanned oral storytelling, intergenerational learning, refugee support, and arts-as-healing, yet funders and institutions underestimated their civic and cultural role. I conducted a narrative assessment to clarify their core story, surface key misunderstandings about Somali arts and civic life, and map their audiences across elders, youth, diaspora communities, and policymakers. I then outlined a long-term narrative architecture for their vision of a permanent Somali Cultural Hub, emphasizing cultural sovereignty and intergenerational preservation. Even without implementation, the assessment gave them a strategic framework they can return to as they expand visibility, strengthen funding, and build toward a permanent home.
A neighborhood-based storytelling initiative served hundreds of community members but had no cohesive narrative describing its long-term cultural impact. Public communication had collapsed into lists of events and projects, with little articulation of outcomes, value, or distinct contribution. I identified their core narrative as the preservation of generational memory through community-centered storytelling practices and reframed their work as a cultural infrastructure project rather than a series of events. I then translated this into a strategic narrative framework they could use to approach funders, partners, and civic institutions. This provided them with a blueprint for moving from an informal initiative to a more institutionally legible cultural anchor.
The following case studies draw from my published writing, demonstrating how I analyze artists and cultural institutions using the same narrative frameworks I apply to organizational work.
In writing about the exhibition Across the Diaspora, I identified its core structural driver as the remapping of Black identity across geographies, mediums, and historical ruptures. Instead of offering a piece-by-piece description, I constructed a narrative framework that traced movement, displacement, re-rooting, and cultural reconstruction across the show. This allowed institutions and audiences to see the exhibition as a coherent cultural intervention rather than a collection of disconnected works. My analysis positioned the curatorial thesis within a larger diasporic narrative system, strengthening the exhibition’s conceptual clarity and cultural intelligibility.
My analysis of Gary Logan’s work reframed his practice as a sustained exploration of Black masculine interiority and emotional evolution. By naming the narrative system governing his imagery—memory, metamorphosis, and self-repair—I revealed psychological and structural layers often missed in surface readings. I positioned his work not just as visual expression but as a narrative architecture of self-formation and healing. This helped institutions and readers recognize the emotional and narrative sophistication embedded in his practice.
In my piece on Rajaa Gharbi’s work, I identified the narrative architecture behind her painting practice as an act of decolonial identity reconstruction and reclamation of indigeneity. I articulated structural drivers such as ancestral retrieval, spatial sovereignty, and embodied memory, allowing the paintings to be understood as a system of meaning rather than isolated images. By framing her practice within this larger narrative system, I clarified the cultural stakes of her work and elevated the level of critical discourse surrounding it.