About

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I design worlds — for film and television, for experiences and activations — spaces built to carry story in their bones.

I came to production design through architecture. After a BFA from the University of Oregon, I earned my Master of Architecture at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, where my graduate thesis became an obsession with the one thing the two disciplines share: how a built space makes you feel before you've consciously read it. Film was always in my DNA — I grew up inspired by my great-uncle Sam Rolfe, the screenwriter behind Have Gun, Will Travel and The Man From U.N.C.L.E., and my great-aunt Hilda Rolfe, who worked with Fritz Lang and David O. Selznick.

I'm a conceptual thinker by nature, and I thrive on the discovery at the heart of the work: how to build a world designed for the camera, so the camera can articulate the feeling of the script and tell the story visually. I think in plan, light, and material, designing spaces that hold a character's psychology and a scene's dramatic logic, not just its look. I trained for years under Dennis Gassner — first as his researcher, then assistant art director, then art director on The Gray Man and The Electric State — and across large, complex productions I learned where to spend and where to imply, how to make any budget read like money. I've built worlds across the USA and abroad in the U.K., Malta, and Scotland.

I'm now working fully as a production designer — for features and television, experiences and activations. What drives me is building a space that works two ways at once: an environment whose emotion the camera can capture, and a place real enough that the actors can fully inhabit their characters.

If you're building a world — especially something with a strong point of view — I'd want to know what it needs to feel like to live in that environment, and how it leads the viewer along.

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