In 2021, Joey launches The Story Road, a service that produces legacy videos. There is nothing more exciting to her than giving shape to someone’s story. While producing The Moth, she mid-wifed 100’s of stories including those of George Plimpton, Mira Nair, Tony Hendra, Ann Magnuson, Lisa Kron, Peter Hedges, Griffin Dunne, and Bingham Ray. It makes sense that she is currently a story development consultant and continues to write stories, and screenplays.
Joey was born in Chicago and raised among the cornfields of Indiana.At 17 years old, she knew she wanted to follow her own path forward. She opted to spend two summers cutting lawns, saved $2000, and took a one-way flight to Belgium after graduating High School. She traveled the world and applied to Wesleyan University while visiting Jerusalem. She attended Wes and spent her summers in California and Nantucket, exploring both coasts. After graduation, she moved to New York City, taught pre-school on the Upper East Side, where she swears she learned everything she needed to know about managing people. She always had a fascination with theater and volunteered at WOW Café Theater in the East Village.
When her Mom died, she was despondent, moved to California, and landed a gig working as an administrator at a construction company. Eventually, she worked full-time at Brava! For Women in the Arts, Little did she know that this trifecta of jobs (pre-school, theater, and business admin) was the perfect combination to equip her to launch The Moth in NYC, invited by George Green. Joey co-created and produced The Moth from 1997 until 2002. The beauty of being totally immersed in this life for five years was the opportunity to develop storytelling based on her beliefs about the power of connecting with people. One consequence of 9/11 was Joey’s departure from The Moth in Dec 2011. She met her (now ex) husband on a plane, moved back to California, and raised her amazing son, Magnus.
Joey was fortunate to work at the acclaimed Actual Films and is grateful for what she learned. From there, she went to Berkeley City College in 2007 and spent ten years teaching a fabulous cadre of diverse students. One of her students guided her to Youth UpRising, an East Oakland Youth Center, where she met Clarence Thomas (CT Beats) in 2009. She treasured her time working with the young and gifted artists at YU. Her divorce required she land her first corporate gig which she did at an executive search firm, Russell Reynolds Associates. She worked for Carol Emmott who eventually hired Joey to produce a documentary on Carol's life when she knew her cancer had limited her time. A screening of Carol’s documentary led friends to create a Fellowship for Women Leaders in Healthcare in honor of Carol Emmott. It is a fabulous organization that serves women in healthcare around the country.
During this time, Joey wrote and performed stories and produced a storytelling event at Telluride Film Festival featuring a rousing group of storytellers: Buck Henry, Teller, Jason Reitman, Tamara Jenkins, Joyce Maynard, Michael Fitzgerald, and hosted by Salmon Rushdie. She went to Cuba in March of 2016 to explore the theme: What Is Love In Cuba? in pursuit of a multimedia project.
Meanwhile, CT Beats called to bring her on board as his manager. She founded Queen JAX Music, a management company for Urban Music Artists. While working with CT Beats & UMC, Joey collaborated to secure a publishing deal with Warner Chappell for those artists.
Joey entered the tech world, inspired by teaching Movies to Multimedia, a class that addressed the current digital revolution. She spent a year at Leap Motion, a startup that created hand and position tracking in virtual and augmented reality. Because tech companies are risky, Leap Motion lost funding and Joey landed at GitHub, an open-source software platform for developers. Joey produced the first Manager MeetUp for GitHub and a series of videos to support the collaboration between Microsoft and Hubbers. Joey has a deep and abiding love of GitHub.
