I come from a large, very loud family. My earliest memory of quiet is a story — a film, or somebody just telling one. The room would fall silent. That was what got me: everyone watching the same thing, patiently, and every one of us seeing something different.
Mark Diaco
Everything since has been one pursuit, exploded across as many mediums and disciplines as it takes to tell it — ink, design, the stage, film, twenty years of nights on a rope, and now a company.
Eight doors. Every one of them changed the way the story got told.
Self-taught illustrator.
Learned to draw by reading an obsessive amount of comic books. Nobody taught him — the pages did.
Batman was the first teacher.
Boredom is the restless invitation to daydreaming, which leads to creativity — and more importantly, patience.
Studied graphic design.
Dropped out. Kept designing anyway — the craft never needed the enrolment.
Left the course. Didn't leave the work.
An accountant never has to justify their purpose to society. An artist has to solve why they see the world as 1 + 1 = orange.
Lived in New York City.
Trained as an actor at the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute and William Esper Studio. Learned that a performance is a life, borrowed and returned honestly.
Strasberg · Esper
You may not always know when you're being lied to — but you sure as shit know it when you're seeing the utmost truth.
Returned to Melbourne.
Co-founded HST — Human Sacrifice Theatre — and later The KIN Collective. True West, Glengarry Glen Ross, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Built from the ground up, nothing inherited.
No permission required.
When it's all said and done, theatre came before us and will be here long after us.
His own production company.
Began developing original films and graphic-novel IP — Half Way, ClicK, and eventually DOORMAN.
Social media has us all looking down at our devices. One can only hope we return to looking up at the big screen.
Twenty years on the rope.
Worked as a nightclub doorman across dozens of Melbourne CBD venues. Learned crowd psychology, gatekeeping, culture, power — and the meaning of who gets in.
A threshold is a position of power, and power only works in service of the people passing through it.
Becoming a father.
Everything recalibrated. The future stopped being abstract — it became a person who would inherit whatever the rest of us decided was normal.
Something I can hand to my son.
Of everything I've created or collaborated on, all of it dwarfs in comparison to the creation of life itself.
Founded DOOR Global.
Every door before this one was practice for the same question. This one answers it for artists: their work, their name, their terms.
In this new digital age, let's not lose track of the five digits on our hand.
Consent isn't a feature we added; it's the floor everything stands on.
Eight doors · one threshold