SUM

mc | writer | performer | creative director

Indie Music Awards Nominee, with songs appearing in Breaking Bad, Saints Row The Third, Saints Row IV, Sons of Anarchy, and countless network television shows. Frontman of The Milky Way. Collaborators include Ski Beatz, Needlz, Jesse Shatkin, Nate Donmoyer, Blockhead, P.U.D.G.E, DK The Punisher, Meshell N’Degeocello, stic.man, Tash of Tha Alkaholiks, Ikey Owens (RIP) and many other luminaries.

Creative director, hip-hop artist, and decorated writer Sum has crafted a visionary approach to his chosen career paths, often trailblazing spaces years before those spaces enter mainstream conversations. Music from the two-time Independent Music Award nominee’s recent work has been featured in Saints Row and dozens of TV shows including Breaking Bad and Sons of Anarchy. He continues to enjoy creating and releasing music for a number of different projects and collaborations, most recently completing his upcoming LP, House of the Red Solar Sky, which features collaborations with Meshell N’Degeocello, stic.man (Dead Prez), Big Rube and more. His band, The Milky Way, had a relentless ten year run through Los Angeles. Their stage show and presence was so dynamic they landed residencies at legendary venues, and appearances in major campaigns for Toyota and LinkedIn without ever releasing an album.

The former music journalist’s work as a CLIO Award winning copywriter and creative director, is visible on the national stage with projects like Donald Glover’s Atlanta, Jordan Peele’s The Last O.G., Hulu’s Wu-Tang: An American Saga, as well as projects for Apple Music and Amazon Music, to name a few. In these areas, his inventiveness and knowledge of culture has been tapped on to create iconic social media campaigns, and train discovery algorithms. He currently works as a full-time Creative Director for GLOW Interactive, where he leads creative teams on digital marketing campaigns and new business pitches for high profile entertainment clients. As an activist, he is currently serving as Creative Director in Residence for the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition (LACAN) helping to mainstream awareness around the ever expanding police surveillance state. Here, his work received Resist Foundation grants, and was nominated for a Mozilla Foundation Creative Leadership Award exploring the potential harms of AI in predictive policing. He holds residencies as Entrepreneur-In-Residence at Virginia Tech Dept. of Library Sciences and as an inaugural i4 Resident (Improvisation, Inspiration, Incubation, and Immersion) at the Virginia Tech Institute for Creativity, Arts and Technology (iCAT). These engagements are informing his creative work, which is on a collision course with where art, narrative, AI and world-building overlap. His current passion project is the Kizmet Experience Studio, where his knowledge of different mediums and technology will explore visual storytelling for TV and interactive. The Kizmet Experience Studio is currently developing TV titles that explore the supernatural, technology, climate change and our ever evolving relationship with identity.