Born and raised in New York City and Long Island, Rob had an early exposure to international culture and travel through friends whose parents worked at the United Nations, as well as his own father, who often embarked on global business trips. He also developed an early obsession with stories and the arts, absorbing them and crafting his own.

While attending Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, he participated in the Young Diplomats program, which took him to Tokyo for a two-week reciprocal exchange program. Following high school, Rob deferred college for a year to participate in an experimental one-year immersive study abroad program in Tokyo, where he lived with a Japanese family and went to a Japanese high school.

While studying international relations at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Rob studied abroad in Greece and Hungary, and lived and worked as a musician and leather jacket salesman for a summer in Florence, Italy. It was during this trip that Rob visited Venice for the first time and stood in wonder in the Doge’s Palace, gazing at Tintoretto’s Paradise. Feeling an undeniable attachment to Venice and the painting, Rob returned to Venice that fall to experience it again and has since made subsequent trips.

After college, Rob worked for a department of the Japanese government in New York that helped American companies do business in Japan, before co-founding a gourmet food and beverage distribution company in Brooklyn. However, his love for storytelling only increased. He enrolled in the New School University’s screenwriting program, and after writing two scripts and selling his business, he moved to Los Angeles.

In L.A., Rob attended the renowned professional program at Writers Boot Camp, wrote an additional seven screenplays and secured agent and managerial representation. Of his nine features, five were optioned and one short was produced. While writing, Rob continued to pursue a business career, focusing on technology startups. After working in business development, sales and marketing at software companies and a water technology company, Rob founded his second company, a SaaS platform that connected artists, art galleries and art collectors. But despite working eighty-hour weeks and being neck-deep in the startup world, Rob couldn’t put his love for writing aside and never forgot Tintoretto’s Paradise, so he started working on the manuscript for The Prisoner of Paradise. With only so much time in the day, he wrote the first draft with Tracey Stone, a writing partner with whom he’d previously collaborated on a short and feature script.

Due to unforeseeable events, Rob’s art startup folded, but that afforded him more time to focus on his writing and hone his craft. He worked in senior business development and sales positions at additional tech startups before he and his family decided to relocate from the beaches of California to the mountains of Denver, just in time for a global pandemic. He is currently VP of Business Development at HIVE Diversity, a revolutionary platform that democratizes the early career recruiting process, working on two sequels to The Prisoner of Paradise, and devouring his wife’s homemade pizza and pasta.

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