Mark Abramson, Production Director, was born in California and raised in Hawaii, where he learned to play slack-key guitar and spent as much time as possible surfing the reefs around the island of Oahu. He spent a year after high school traveling and surfing around Australia, New Zealand, and Indonesia, and then commenced his college education, receiving an A.B. with honors in Economics from U.C. Berkeley, after which he moved to New York City.
After a stint as an economist on Wall Street, Mark worked for the architecture firm Gensler & Associates’ New York office. When his side-project rock band was offered a recording contract, Mark quit his day job and plunged headlong into the music business. Over the next decade he made numerous recordings, toured nationally and in Europe, hung out with East Village scenesters, ran a nightclub, and worked at a recording studio as a songwriter and musician.
At the end of this intensely creative period, Mark decided to change gears. Moving back to Hawaii offered Mark a chance to develop a relationship with his second love– graphic design. He spent some time in publishing, learning the basics of publication design and production, prior to establishing his own firm, Zen Jam. In Honolulu, Mark developed projects for several publishing houses, ad agencies, design firms and individual clients.
He brought his design business to San Francisco in 1999, where his projects included work for book publishers, academia, and music industry clients like Motörhead and Metallica. At the same time, Mark continued to work on music, scoring independent films, live performance, and producing recordings for several underground recording artists. Mark’s work in both design and music can be viewed on his web site. After many years designing magazines, books, and CD/DVD packaging – and working on his music under the radar – Mark joined Other Minds as its new Production Director. In his spare time Mark surfs Ocean Beach, plays guitar, walks his Labrador retriever, reads non-fiction, and hangs out with his wife and stepson, friends, and family.
