AJ Cutler Exemplifies The Future of Telemark

Though still quiet and mostly off the radar, the emerging free-heel new school isn’t your father’s telemark scene. Though always broader than the jamband-loving, elder ski bum stereotype that has long followed the sport, free-heel skiing’s cutting edge has lately and decisively moved on, with a trendier vanguard shifting the sport markedly over the last few years. Instead of purposefully, perhaps stubbornly retaining a dogmatic zeal for The Turn, modern free-heel thought leaders strive for style and creativity, but also mainstream adjacency, eschewing insulation for a vibe they hope will make telemark more appealing to a younger, contemporary subset.   

And AJ Cutler may personify the new free-heel order as well as anyone. The artist and content creator is newer to telemark, but hard skiing; she’s a woman shredding the park in a sport long fitfully evolving, and at times struggling with inclusion. And her huge digital footprint (the trendy repurposed fashion she creates has garnered her marketing collabs with myriad brands, not to mention nearly 25,000 Instagram followers) has made her perhaps telemark’s biggest influencer, a rising star with a wider appeal in a free-heel world pining for both. 

Still, Cutler’s influence on telemark seems nascent, perhaps an inflection point not yet passed.

“I haven't had much interaction with telemark outside of seeing TELE COLO films and then last year when we were filming for it,” Cutler says, perhaps illustrating both free-heel’s long-standing isolation but also its broader evolution in progress.

“I think it's definitely different than maybe the initial perception that maybe other people have,” she notes.

Talking with me from her home in Salt Lake City, a homebase from where she travels to myriad locales for projects, collaborations, and adventures, Cutler speaks of the life of a modern artist and content creator. “I've been fortunate enough to work for myself. In the content creation, filmmaking, commercial production space, I kind of just do a bunch of odd jobs so I don't have to have a regular 9 to 5,” Cutler says modestly as her cat jumps on her desk. “And it's worked out so far.” 

Cutler and her husband Nic Carnazzo, himself an artist, photographer, and cinematographer, began their journeys in content creation a decade ago through their shared website Nac for Adventure, an eclectic blend of rivulets combining everything from vegan recipes to long form writing, all acting as a springboard for Cutler’s current trajectory.

“Nac for Adventure was started back when I was a college student. Me and my partner just love to adventure in various ways. And so I just wanted an outlet for creativity, specifically writing. And it's definitely evolved in the past ten years,” Cutler says.

That wider purview has since developed into something a bit more focused, where much of Culter’s content finds its audience on YouTube, blending her penchant for visual art with other creative outlets. Longer instructional yoga flow for skier videos and poems read aloud are interspersed with shorts on the stylish, thrifted, upcycled fashion she creates.

Cutler’s social media presence–built largely off of her upcycled fashion, outdoor pursuits, and content creation–began incorporating a certain lunging turn a few years ago. Whereas bigger free-heel Instagram accounts, like Josh Madsen of the now shuttered Freeheel Life ski shop, or CJ Coccia’s TELE COLO see their posts garner a few hundred to rarely a few thousand likes, some of Cutler’s telemark posts began seeing far more engagement. That led to the attention of Coccia, who invited Cutler to join the TELE COLO crew for the filming of their 2025 feature worthless milk.

“CJ reached out to me last winter to come out and be a part of their park segment just because I'd been gaining some social media attraction with telemark,” Cutler says. ”It was really fun to film with him and ski with all of these other tele skiers. No one else that I know really teles.”

Like it has for many modern telemark skiers, Coccia’s work through his moviehouse TELE COLO had earlier inspired Cutler to pick up free-heel skiing, particularly the outfit’s first full-length feature THIS IS TELEMARK, released in 2022, a film that has had a mellow if meaningful impact on the modern telemark discourse.

“Three years ago–it was like fall of 2022–I watched the THIS IS TELEMARK film that CJ made,” Cutler says. “My friend had worked on another one of the films. So I went to go support her and then I saw THIS IS TELEMARK and I was like ‘I need to do this.’ They just made it look so cool.”

That inspired Cutler to take to the free-heel turn in her own film.

“About that time, I was trying to plan out my own first ski film…And that was all alpine skiing. And after that was over, I was like, ‘Well, now what?’ And so I just thought it'd be fun to try something new.” 

For now, it seems one of telemark’s rising figures will keep to a mellower approach, an ebb Cutler seems to naturally take to as much as flow. Cutler is taking this year off from creating a ski film. “I am not working on one,” she says. “I feel like I've worked on stuff like every other year. I kind of always need a little break in between.”

In a broader sense, Cutler plans to continue onward in much the way she has, though naturally oscillating to that quieter moment. Asked what’s next for her as a human being, the creator says that life outdoors, art, and community remain key, while the next horizon is perhaps still undefined.

“I really don't have any crazy big plans right now. It's definitely kind of more of an in-between phase,” Cutler says. “But I hope to just continue living here in Salt Lake. It's a really great outdoor community, but it's also a great art and film community. So, I'm just still supporting people with that and helping friends with any project. But right now, I'm taking the backseat.”

But regardless of if Cutler is taking to a quieter approach for the meantime, the creator is perhaps destined to have an outsized impact on skiing, and especially telemark. She was invited to this season’s SKI Magazine ski test at Deer Valley, something she arrived at on her 75mm free-heel bindings.

And in form, reach, and ethos, Cutler seems poised to emerge as an influential force in telemark, a sport she only recently took to, and a journey that is inseparable from her broader ideals.

“I literally had a dream where I was like, ‘I need to tell people this.’ Like people need to hear that they can do anything they want,” she says of the coda to “French Fries In My Harmonica.”

“And maybe it was also partially just telling me that I can do that. Like make a film or do a trick. But I just really wanted to get that message out and that's something that is beyond the film as well. I try and tell my friends that. I try and tell my community that.”