I attended New York City's Stuyvesant High School and graduated with honors from Boston's New England Conservatory of Music. My jazz compositions received awards from NEC, the Jazz Composers Alliance/Julius Hemphill Composition Award, and the John Lennon Songwriting Competition. I produced and performed full-length electro-acoustic soundtracks for Off-Off-Broadway plays, including Shakespeare's King Lear and Macbeth. Additionally, my works have been broadcast worldwide via Public Radio International, performed in formal concert settings, broadcast on PBS, released on CD and DVD, and screened in cinemas across the planet.

I had a long association with the director Masako Tsumura, beginning with her first student film The Impossible. We then moved on to a series of short documentaries for SONY Japan's Global Event Village streaming video portal. Our next collaboration was on the feature documentary Arakimentari (directed by Travis Klose, 2004), for which Tsumura worked as Film Editor and I worked as Sound Designer. This had theatrical runs in both the United States and Japan and garnered various awards.

Most recent, director Makoto Sasa's feature documentary Fire Under the Snow made tremendous impact due to its timely examination of torture in Tibet. Aside from several other hats worn on the production, I composed much of the spellbinding music for its theatrical trailer.

In between these projects, I contributed a substantial amount of music to projects involving children and education, most of them web-based multimedia, but one - Tangier Treehouse (directed by David Shadrack Smith and Charlotte Mangin, 2007) - was another feature documentary. Tangier Treehouse was broadcast on PBS in most major markets. In 2009 I advised the distinguished Dr. Stephen Trombley on development for a film about Eliot Spitzer.

I have been a member of Screen Actor's Guild since 1979 (but haven't worked as an actor since 1987!), and formerly served on the Advisory Boards of The African Film Workshop and the Creative Music Foundation of Woodstock, NY. Other interests include UI frameworks (of course); operating systems; anthropology; geo-politics; green technologies; Asian and European cultures; ancient, classical and esoteric musical traditions; tea.

My most important occupation - by far - is that of Dad. I live in Brooklyn with my wife, daughter and son. My father, who got me started as a maker-of-things, is the visual artist Louis Mendez.