Buzz Editor

Growing up in South Central Los Angeles, California I’ve been making short films since a young age of 9. I started with Animation using Paint on a 98′ Microsoft Desktop. I soon advanced to Animation Filmmaking by using a technique called Stop motion by positioning my toys from my toy box in a complex scene which I then edited on Windows Movie Maker. I did many of these until I acquired the skill to shoot Live action stories. I attended West Adams Preparatory High School in South Los Angeles, were I was given my first DSLR Camera Canon EOS 550D by my Mother Erika Lovett Holly. I used the Camera to create many Short Films with my friends around campus, and with the praise from my local peers I began to take filmmaking serious.

I started his career after an internship at Inner-City Filmmakers in Santa Monica, California. Soon after that I went to college at California State University, Northridge which after 3 years decided to dropout. With the connections I gained from the internship and University I’ve been blessed with opportunities to work intensely with Companies like Warner Brothers, Legendary Pictures, Disney, Marvel, Technicolor’s The Mill and Artists like Swae Lee, Lil Snupe, Lil Boosie, Nicki Minaj and Bleu Davinci.

When I was about seven years old, my parents would dress me up in a little suit and send me to first grade with a blue plastic briefcase. I collected notepads, pens, and library cards and was always writing down what people were saying. This made me a target for bullying, but ironically business and communication have been apart of my life. I’ve also always loved to sing. At my core, I am a writer. I think of myself as a visionary–someone with big ideas.

Throughout 2007-2010, I sung in Myspace competition, and got a chance to intern at Power 106 radio station in LA, and also at ASCAP. These were my “official” introductions to the entertainment business. It wasn’t until I published my first book, Views from the Cockpit, in 2019, that I realized I could be a writer per say.

After this book, I got into the studio to record the audiobook and slowly began creating music again. Those two events reminded me how much joy music gives me and how fun it is to develop characters and write stories.

I’d say I started young, but then took a winding road. I’ve loved making music, performing, and acting since I was little. My dad is a guitarist and works promoting rock concerts, so I got to go to shows from before I could walk. I was at Grateful Dead shows when I was two. I’d see Mick Jagger, Bruce Spingsteen, Prince, David Bowie etc and something about what they were doing on stage made me innately say to myself – “that’s what I want to do.”

So any time I got the opportunity to perform, I would. I jumped onstage singing Tutti Frutti at my grade school talent show, and I performed Thriller at another one (complete with all of Michael’s moves). I also loved movies and acting. I think watching Bruce Lee movies got me hooked (I’m a martial artist too). So I was in my grade school production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (love me some Shakespeare).

The winding part of my story really began in high school. I loved playing football and I wanted to get into a good college, so I focused on that. I worked REALLY hard and I got into Harvard University. But once I got there I hit a wall. Some of the things that had been driving me stopped working. I’d chosen to pursue a degree in economics (I was at Harvard – I might as well figure out how to make money, right?). But that wasn’t my passion. I had, what I like to call, a “quarter-life crisis.” Ultimately I finished my degree, but I decided to move to LA afterward and pursue my original dream from when I was a kid.

In LA I started acting and I joined a band and started playing out. I got to be in movies and TV shows (Brick with Joseph Gordon-Levitt, ABC’s The Middle, and The Rookie most recently). And I got to play all of LA’s most historic clubs (The Viper Room, the Whisky A Go Go, the Troubador) as well as some of the biggest festivals in the country (Bonnaroo, the Outside Lands Festival, the Life is Beautiful festival, SXSW). We toured and made a couple of albums. It was a blast, but we didn’t break through the way we’d dreamed of. So, as most bands do, we fell apart.

After the band broke up, I retreated to the studio to get in touch with my next wave of creativity. I got in touch with the things that made me fall in love with music and performing when I was little. I had to decide what I wanted to say that would be more powerful than what I’d been saying to that point. And how I wanted to say it. Also, how I wanted to promote it so that it would have a greater impact in the world. That was the genesis of my new project – AVATARI.