I am a digital media developer by occupation — I do web design, image manipulation, photography, video production, and CD-ROMs. My passion is developing ideas into compelling or funny images. I live in Detroit, Michigan.

I was born in Lviv, Ukraine on May 20, 1976. My mother was a designer at the "Electron" TV factory, my father an assistant professor at the Department of Radioelectronics at Lviv Polytechnic Institute. After the Soviet Union collapsed and the economy went down the drain, my mom took adult learning courses and started working as an accountant; my father became a technician at an industrial electronics installation enterprise.

I went to a kindergarten around the corner, then to school a hundred yards farther. The school was specialized, with enhanced learning of English as a foreign language, about which I didn't care then, but which turned out to be the best intellectual investment my parents could give me. On graduation, I was admitted to Lviv Polytechnic National University at the department of Computer Aided Design. My diploma thesis there was called "Analogous Radioelectronic Devices Parametric Optimization Graphic Interface Design," that's pretty much all I remember from that highly technical program.

At school, I was a straight A student at first, then my grades dipped to C, then I straightened out and graduated with a B+ GPA. I continued studying English on my own, spending all my nights reading texts aloud, making my grandma give me strange looks. I devoted more time to this new hobby of mine than to my university studies; after two years, though, I got a gut feeling that if I did well academically, I'd be selected for a semester abroad. I needed such a semester badly to improve my English speaking skills, so from that moment on I was a top student. My intuition proved right when a year later I was indeed selected, among 10 participants from my university, to go to the United Kingdom for one semester. That was fun time — we were the first group to participate in that exchange program, the British side didn't quite know what to do with us, so all we did was study English and explore the beautiful UK. My fellow students who stayed back home studying mandatory military science that bored the hell out of all of us were green with envy.

It was in the UK where I was hooked on the Internet, so on returning home I went looking for an outlet in my city. That was in 1996, when not everyone in Ukraine could spell the word "Internet" correctly. Eventually, my search ended at UARNet, a local ISP, where they had plenty of Internet, but no need for outsiders. I managed to persuade the boss to give me an access in exchange for helping them to make webpages. Thus, I started learning HTML and Photoshop, and after a while I was moved to another Internet access location at the Department of Geography at Lviv State University. There, I volunteered as a webmaster after my classes for a year, after which they offered me a job. The work that I did there eventually landed me a position of a web designer at Wertep Company.

In my spare time during that period, I hanged out mostly with my peers who were Christians. I attended Intervarsity Christian Fellowship gatherings, and went to camps that it organized. For a while, I associated with Ecumenical Network for Youth Action, at whose programs I worked as an interpreter. I took part in organizing a conference for them in my home city, then our goals split and we went different ways.

Meanwhile, professionally, I needed an environment that would be on the forefront both technologically and creatively. At that time, I also developed an interest in cinema and started fantasizing about moving to Hollywood. The easiest way to come to the US was as a student, so in 1997, I started applying to US universities. In my first year of applying, I was admitted to some five schools, but received no financial aid; I kept trying and in 1999 I secured money both from the university and from a private sponsor and went to the Master's program in Mass Communication at the University of Louisiana at Monroe.

There, I studied TV production and theories of communication for a year, then went to my dream city of L.A. for the summer. To find a decent job for such a short term was impossible, so I maintained my living first as a busboy in a Russian restaurant in West Hollywood, then as hands in an Armenian grocery store on Santa Monica boulevard. I worked 10 to 14 hours a day, with sleep being my main entertainment. That period of my life was very simple and happy; the closest I got to moviemaking during my stay in Hollywood was when I got into an accident with an MGM vice-president.

As I finished my second year in Louisiana, I grew to understand feature films were something that I enjoyed watching but not necessarily making. Designing collages in Photoshop or coding HTML was something that I enjoyed much more, so I returned to that. On my graduation, in 2001, I got a job as a production assistant at the Educational Technology Services at Wayne State University, and drove to Detroit, where I lived ever since then. In 2005, I became a permanent resident of Canada, and lived in Windsor ever since.