After working crew on a handful of Indie-features and producing my first Indie The Lower East Side Stories, I found myself at twenty-one-years-old living on a blow-up mattress on the floor of a friend's kitchen in New York City, and decided it would be a good time to go back to school.

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I spent years learning and working in different disciplines in the industry, from independent feature-film production to learning late-night tv at The Late Late Show, interning at The Walt Disney Company and in content development at Zucker/Netter with producer Gil Netter, to my four-year stint as a motion picture talent agent executive assistant at Creative Artists Agency, handling A-list talent.

I spent a lot of years learning and doing for others until I finally gathered up the nerve to start doing it for myself. When I turned thirty, it felt like the directing thing was "now, or never." So, I quit my job, liquidated my meager 401k, and I called all my friends, actors, writers, film crew folks and started asking people if they had content they wanted to make. That year with a Canon 5D and a prayer, I directed 50 short films. A year later, I was a full-time writer, director, editor and content creator at a burgeoning young media company BuzzFeed, making and coming up with original branded content concepts and directing and producing hundreds of videos per year.

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I feel grateful for all of my experiences and privileged to have learned from some of the best in the business. I remember in my younger years feeling like the road to directing was taking a really long time, and now looking back, the road I took was simply what it needed to be for me to be ready to meet the demands of the job, and do it exceptionally well. I'm thankful to all who leant a helping hand over the years, especially my mentor tv-director Ed Bianchi (Deadwood, Boardwalk Empire, Mad Men) who invited me to the set of The Killing in Vancouver to shadow him. To this day, I still use some tricks I picked up from Ed.

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From Chicago, Illinois, Michael is an award winning video director and creative content producer with 250+ million content views on social digital channels, and over twenty mentions on the YouTube Ads Leaderboard listing the "top ten ads that people choose to watch."

Michael is recognized with several awards, most notably for "Dear Kitten" as the #1 top ad by a YouTube content creator in 2014, winner of the Digiday Best Creative Award in 2014, a 2015 Webby for Best Branded Content, and a nomination for "favorite YouTube ad of the past decade" from Google's YouTube.

Michael was also awarded a 2023 and 2022 DAYTIME EMMY® AWARD for Outstanding Entertainment Talk Show for his contributions to The Kelly Clarkson Show on NBC, and was a 2020 semi-finalist in the Commercial Director's Diversity Program. In 2018 he won a ThinkLA Idea Award for Best Video Campaign, a 2017 Summit Emerging Media Visionary Award for Best Internet Video Campaign, and a 2014 LA Stage Alliance Ovation Award for Best Video / Projection Design for THE WRONG MAN, a live theatrical stage performance that became an off-Broadway production and a recorded album. Michael's work in scripted entertainment has premiered at prestigious festivals and venues, from Slamdance Film Festival in Park City, Utah to the Modern Museum of Art in New York City.

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Michael's comedy shorts have been mentioned in the media including The Huffington Post, especially the comedy web series “The Best Of Craigslist” launched on www.funnyordie.com. Best Of Craigslist was nominated for BEST WEB SERIES by LA WEEKLY at the 2013 LA WEEKLY WEB AWARDS, and was broadcast as a recurring segment on "Rachel Dratch's Late Night Snack," on TruTV appearing as "Classified Comedy."

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Michael has worked across multiple genres and categories, including music videos for artists as varied as DAFT PUNK and MUMFORD & SONS.