With a long ranging career began in his teens, Jamie first became known to Bay Area audiences as a performance poet, winning his first slam competition in 1999. Known for his fast paced mix of stand up, theater and hip hop, he went on to become the National Poetry Slam Champion, the Oakland and Berkeley Grand Slam Champion, NPR’s Snap Judgment “Performer of the Year”, and was a featured performer on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, 60 Minutes, UPN and CBS. Awarded “Best Poet” of the Bay Area by the East Bay Express two years in a row, Jamie is also a mentor for Youth Speaks, the nation’s leading presenter of Spoken Word education. He’s performed and lead writing workshops at over 130 universities, high schools and juvenile detention centers across the U.S, and hosted the first-ever slam poetry competition at San Quentin Penitentiary.
In addition he’s shot and directed over 25 award winning films for the Bigger Picture Project, an acclaimed, statewide series of films on Diabetes that have gone viral on UpWorthy, with his performances and films accumulating over 3 million shared views across the world and winning the Spirit of 1848 award from the American Public Health Association. His films have won “Best Cinematography” (Scream 2014), “Best Writing” (Rio Grind 2014), and “Best Acting Performance” (Briefs 2013), and he continues to curate and host the Scream East Bay Express Horror Film Festival and the East Bay’s Briefs Short Film Festival, also teaching high school students documentary and narrative film-making with Lunchbox International.
The great-grandson of Scientology creator L. Ron Hubbard, Jamie is an outspoken critic of the church. He has been interviewed by Inside Edition, the Young Turks, CBS, BBC and NBC. He was the host of the first ever anti Scientology summit in Clearwater, Florida and was a keynote speaker at the first international conference in Dublin, Ireland. His live NPR performance about his lineage entitled “The God and the Man” was awarded Snap Judgment’s “Performance of the Year” and quickly became a viral hit, garnering national press from the Village Voice, the Washington Post, and the Huffington Post.
Jamie is currently working on new screenplays, a one man show and is a producer for NPR’s storytelling show Snap Judgment. He is always looking for new ways to expand as an artist and filmmaker.
