My work has spanned multiple industries and continents — from photography, journalism, and teaching after my undergraduate, to operations, systems design, and product development after a master's. The timeline, newest to oldest:
After years in operations, management, development, and systems design — I discovered a pattern and a passion. My past experience has followed a clear path: analyze a system, dream up a design, and deploy a solution.
This has evolved into Ozvåag — a solo venture that works across multiple industries to build tools and products that solve real problems. From nonprofit software reducing the headache of organizing information (Urban Harvest) to an after-hours receptionist for the staffing industry (AfterHours — FOC). Feel free to explore more active projects by following the link below.
After amicably resigning from the nonprofit, I was tapped as Director of Operations for a growing recruiting firm. The position was multifaceted in nature, allowing me to work behind the scenes improving workflows while also managing a growing team of spectacular recruiters. This division eventually grew enough to justify the creation of a brand-new team focused specifically on healthcare.
The firm wasn't new to me — I had handled its business development and marketing remotely.
The role was the full sweep of running a division: hiring and onboarding staff, daily meetings, monthly and quarterly reviews, strategy and goal setting, metrics, balance sheets, commission splits, tech problems, cost-cutting analysis, and streamlining the workflows underneath it all. Along the way, we stood up a brand-new healthcare staffing division from zero.
The streamlining is where it turned. The workflows were spreadsheets, hand-offs, and manual processes — I lived inside them daily, and began rebuilding them, one by one, into software. Eventually the tools outgrew the firm they were built for. They became Ozvåag.
I was selected to lead a local agricultural nonprofit through the pandemic. Over the course of two years I built a staff from 0 to 7, raised $1.7 million in funding, and initiated programs which are still running today — generating and distributing fresh, free produce to the communities that need it most.
With a master's degree in hand, I flew home to be a present uncle for Christmas while applying to jobs across Europe. COVID closed international borders — and the opportunities behind them. As those doors shut, an unexpected one flung open.
I stepped in as the organization's first and only paid staff, with zero nonprofit experience — and learned the sector by running it: board development, bylaws, grant cycles, program design, and any other hat the mission required. Alongside operating and funding the existing programs, I created Equitable Land Access, a program connecting landless farmers — many newly arrived from DR Congo, Togo, Burundi, and Liberia — to fertile fields through a 20-year land lease negotiated directly with the county. It's still growing today.
The full story lives on Food Systems →
Having avidly consumed news across a spectrum of outlets, I could never find coverage that explained the why behind the what — or organized world events by region and the strategic stakes underneath. I created The Daily Diplomat to address exactly that: a dispatch from each of eight regional desks, written in the form of the diplomatic cable, with strategy and geopolitics in the foreground.
I completed a full-time master's in geopolitics at Charles University, with a thesis on Chinese aid and investment in Central Asia — money as an instrument of state power. Alongside the coursework, I built a proofreading business and privately tutored a member of parliament.
The decision to study geopolitics wasn't abstract. While living in Russia I had watched sanctions and a collapsing currency halve my contract and my student base — three years abroad had shown me how directly these forces affect ordinary work. I returned to study them formally, and better understand the mechanisms that drive strategy and policy.
Alongside the coursework, I began proofreading to help fund my studies. Eventually, I grew this into a venture proofreading editorials, journals, master's theses, and doctoral papers for academics who needed a native English eye before submission. I also kept up remote business development and marketing for a staffing business back in the U.S., which expanded into two new cities during the two years.
The degree itself was a full-time master's in geopolitics and geoeconomics. That research lives on Academic →
A two-person conceptual-design studio that turned an idea into a pitch-ready visual — 3D concept renderings and look-and-feel packages for commercial, residential, and hospitality projects, sold at a flat fee per project.
Having convinced my friend to leave her comfy architectural job and join me on this adventure, the two of us arrived in Australia on one-year working-holiday visas with a shared aim: generate as much money as possible to get out from under U.S. student debt obligations. This meant saying yes to nearly everything — from photographing houses by day for Scann3d, a tech startup in Melbourne, to hospitality shifts by night.
Combining our backgrounds in business and design, we quickly dreamed up a design concept that challenged the traditional architectural process, which we felt was quite antiquated and prohibitively expensive for a segment of the market. We launched Zink Design Group as a response to this and spent every free moment building it, seeing traction within a few months. The venture was 100% bootstrapped: no investors, no loans, no office — all while sleeping in the car parked in a friend's driveway.
With the visa coming to an end and a proof of concept established, I flew back to the USA to formalize the business as an LLC and grow our client base, while my business partner stayed and handled design. The business persevered for an additional year, but in the end was unscalable and amicably closed its digital doors.
After China, I was offered a long-term contract teaching intermediate-to-advanced English to young professionals, with a focus on IELTS preparation and conversational business English. Though the primary focus was on exam guidance and language proficiency, the lessons often deviated toward cultural nuance and situational adaptation. As Western sanctions began to take effect, the situation became unstable and, eventually, economically untenable.
After months of paperwork and vetting, my work visa was approved and I landed in Russia on December 31st — in the dead of winter, and on one of the most important holidays of the year.
The original contract was financially attractive by any standard, but sanctions and counter-sanctions began to take effect, immediately being felt both visually and financially. Foreign goods such as cheeses and wines began to disappear from the shelves, and the national currency began to depreciate rapidly. From the time I signed the contract to when I taught my first lecture, the Russian ruble had devalued against the U.S. dollar by half. Additionally, as foreign language is a luxury good, my student base had also been halved.
With large gaps in my schedule during the day, I spent every free moment studying the Russian language in courses offered by the institute. To make ends meet, outside of the institute I took on an eclectic mix of private students from higher socio-economic backgrounds. Unable to service U.S. student debt obligations, I began the process of securing a work visa in Australia.
The first year after graduating, I secured a contract with a university in southern China, where I was hired as a professor and tasked with crafting the curriculum for their new business English department and lectured to over 500 students across multiple facilities during the course of two semesters.
After arriving and completing an intense orientation, I was pulled aside and told that I had been selected, based on my experience and education, to lead the university's newly implemented business English department. It quickly became apparent that while my fellow educators were handed curriculum and syllabi, I was now responsible for crafting this course completely from scratch. During the year, I taught the course to 16 different groups of 30+ students — adjusting quickly to life on the other side of the lectern.
In addition to teaching at the university, I was hired privately by companies and individuals to teach sections of the business English curriculum to managers and other employees. This experience took on a much different shape pedagogically, and allowed me to become more creative in the teaching environment. Free time between classes was spent intensely self-studying Mandarin and exploring the cultural history of the country through books, conversations, and travel.
Photography ran beneath everything on this timeline — funding education and visa costs, providing content for various projects and businesses, and all the while allowing me to tell stories. Photos always have been (and always will be) a way to connect with those around me.
While studying, I was director of photography for the university's marketing department and shot freelance for the College of Business, various fraternity and sorority organizations, and on- and off-campus magazines and newspapers.