Kina Pickett was born and raised in Vermont. He lost his father when he was 2, and his mother raised Kina and his brother through their younger years. Kina started skiing at the age of 1.5 and took naturally to the sport. He ski raced through high school and was one of the top skiers in the country. He attended Bates College and continued to ski and hone his skills for the arts. Graduating in 1997 Kina moved to Jackson Hole, Wyoming to pursue his passion of skiing and a life in the mountains.
Being Black and skiing came with its own set of difficulties, but Kina rose above these and broke the mold becoming one of the only Black professional big mountain skiers in the world. He traveled the world skiing on every continent, conquering the highest peak in Europe and adventuring to the the remote regions of Morocco in search of snow. Traveling the world Kina fell in love with photography, but more importantly content creation and the process behind it.
In 2007 Kina co-founded a creative production company called Helio in Bozeman, Montana. Helio worked with some of the largest brands in the world, creating long term content strategy and execution. From Red Bull to Intel, and Nike to Salesforce, Kina helped brands by creating content strategy and worked on narrative flow that led to some amazing work that stood out from the field.
In 2014 Kina began to see a shift in marketing trends which led him to eventually leave Helio and start ZPPR in the fall of 2016. Kina and his team have been working tirelessly to create a truly collaborative platform based around media. ZPPR solves a lot of the inefficiencies in the content creation, gathering, curation, and distribution realm. His past experiences led him to pinpoint a major gap in this process, and ZPPR was the missing link.
Kina has continued to break norms and rise above situations, reinvent himself and push boundaries. He has a passion for fusing technology and storytelling. He wants to change the way that large brands create and curate content, in his mind collaboration is the key.
Kina lives with his wife and two kids outside of Bozeman, Montana. In his spare time, he chas- es his son Ash around the mountains passing along his passion for life and love of the out- doors.
