Brian Gross
owner and founder of eggmedia
Brian Gross lives in Vancouver, Canada and was born in Southern California. At 8 years of age, he started writing and producing plays in his elementary school. By the age of 10 one of his radio plays, “A Rainbow in Mother Goose Land” was produced and broadcast across the United States by National Public Radio.
In his teens he had a career in politics and activism. From 1985 to 1987 he was a Teen Advocate for the Los Angeles County Free Clinic and a Youth Leader for the National Conference for Community and Justice. He was youth coordinator for “No on 64” in 1986 (an HIV/AIDS quarantine initiative, which was defeated), then was Assistant to the California Campaign Manager for Jesse Jackson’s 1988 U.S. Presidential bid, where he also met (in the Lavender Stripe of Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition) and worked with Harry Hay, founder of the Mattachine Society and the Radical Faeries. He received a commendation from the County of Los Angeles Commission On Youth in 1987.
After majoring briefly in political science at Washington, D.C.’s George Washington University and then attending the Sorbonne in Paris, he returned to his love of the arts. In his early 20s he had a busy schedule as a troubadour-cum-performance artist at such Los Angeles area alternative spaces as Highways Performance Spa
ce, The Six Gallery, A Different Light, Beyond Baroque and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. He and his performing troupe, The STIFF Ensemble, were commissioned to perform at various venues and locales, alongside and with such prominent figures as performance artist Tim Miller, librettist Philip Littell, actor/activist Michael Kearns, and playwright James Carroll Pickett. He produced numerous large-scale community events, including, in 1992, the 2-week multimedia showcase, “Gulp…,” with participation of more than 200 Los Angeles-based artists. He also participated in the Los Angeles Artists Coalition and his work was featured in High Performance Magazine‘s special issue addressing the 1992 riots.
From 1993 to 1997 he attended California Institute of the Arts and received his BFA in Art and MFA in the renowned school’s new, and now well-established Creative and Critical Writing program, studying with Dick Hebdige, Norman Klein, Mady Schutzman, and Jon Wagner, among others.
While at CalArts, though not a music major, he began gaining critical recognition for soundtracks and scores he composed for numerous choreographers and video and installation artists. To date he has been commissioned to compose nearly 25 hours of music, including music for his own visual art and music installations featured in shows at venues such as Icaan Galleries, Amanda M. Obering Contemporary Art, Ellen Birrell Studio, and the Barnsdall Metropolitan Art Gallery.
His performance art career expanded to writing and producing full-cast, full-length musical plays, including 1996’s critically-acclaimed “If I Were Lost” (available on DVD) and 1997’s “The Other Side,” which he created as an Artist-in-Residence at the Ucross Foundation.
In the mid-1990’s he began creating, teaching and securing funding from government and private foundations for creative arts programs for at-risk and homeless youth at Hollywood’s My Friend’s Place and at the gay/lesbian/transgender alternative secondary schools EAGLES (in Los Angeles) and OASIS (in Long Beach). He helped his students 
to publish several books and websites, and to produce numerous CD’s, performances and exhibitions, including at the 1999 exhibition, “Pros and Protégés,” at Los Angeles’ Municipal Arts Gallery. Around the same time, he was also house manager for the drug and alcohol recovery program at Liberty House in Century City and became a board member and then Director of Operations at the non-profit arts organization, Arts Manhattan. With Arts Manhattan, starting in 1996, he curated, produced, publicized, raised funds and wrote catalogues for numerous well-received arts exhibitions, excursions and events (including numerous site-specific dance spectacles) until 2004. Performance and visual artists he worked with included Tom Wudl, Howard Ben Tré, Gwynne Murrill, DeWain Valentine, Livio Seguso, Ray Kappe, Dulce Capadocia, Oguri, TRIP Dance Theatre, Regina Klenjoski Dance Company, and others.
In 1999 he joined the faculty at California State University – Fullerton, and went on to teach writing, journalism, media management, animation, and production techniques for audio, video, multimedia and web until 2004. He also was lead singer and wrote and composed songs for the EBM band Apocrypho (signed to ADSR Musicwerks), whose 2000 album “Spiritual Cannibal” received glowing reviews and continues to receive play in clubs and radio stations in North America and Europe. Songs from the album have been included in nearly a dozen high-profile compilations.
In 2004 he moved to Jakarta, Indonesia, where, along with teaching, he finished up work on two textbooks, as well as supporting websites and multimedia interactive CD-ROMs that covered topics of media production and management (published by Focal Press in 2005 and 2006).
Since immigrating to Vancouver, Canada in 2005, he has been recruited to write for a book on media ethics (published in 2008, also by Focal Press), and is completing a book of poetry, “Death by Beak” and other writing projects. He has been the interactive CD-ROM and website developer for the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Foundation’s “Journeys Below the Line” educational series, which has so far included installments covering production aspects of the hit television series “24” (2005), “ER” (2006), and “Lost” (2007).
In Vancouver, he has consulted and had numerous engagements in business, academia and the arts, including as Executive Director of both the Goh Ballet Academy, a world-recognized classical ballet academy, and the Goh Ballet Vancouver Society, which oversees a performing and touring company recognized in North America, Asia and Europe as Canada’s best youth dance ensemble. In this capacity he has worked with luminaries of the ballet world such as Eddy Toussaint, Maina Gielgud, Anna-Marie Holmes, Martin Fredmann, Karen Kain (former Chair of the Canada Council for the Arts), and others.
His consultancy services in web design, graphic design, publicity, process and training are now available through his consultancy firm, eggmedia. Eggmedia's consultancy services naturally focus in the fields where Brian has extensive background and experience: the arts, immigration, the non-profit sector, education, addictions recovery and metaphysics.
Contact us for a no-obligation consultation and quote.
