Practice

I am a performer and storyteller at heart.

By beginning as the spectacle rather than the spectator, every thought that I have about film relates to the human experience and story.

My background also includes Fulbright experience in Utrecht, where I studied Dutch and taught English. Working across languages and cultural contexts remains part of how I think about people, place, and the assumptions we bring into a room.

I want the camera to hold empathy for everything in the frame: the person at the center of the story, the people at its edges, and the world they inhabit. Someone can be selfish, funny, cruel, frightened, or wrong and still deserve our attention. I want to understand what they are doing and what it costs the people around them.

I keep returning to the performance of contemporary life. People learn how to appear competent, desirable, successful, generous, or untroubled, and those performances can become difficult to escape. Technology gives us ways to find each other while creating new pressures to present ourselves, take sides, and remain visible. I’m interested in how connection and isolation can occupy the same room, relationship, or screen.

I work closely with cinematographers on the visual design of a film and with sound designers on how we experience its world. Framing, light, color, movement, texture, and sound shape whose experience we enter. A voice from another room, a phone, or a change in the atmosphere can alter a scene before anyone explains what has happened.

My education in photography and art history informs that attention to gesture, composition, objects, and the relationship between a body and its surroundings. My international background also makes me attentive to how place and cultural expectations shape behavior. I think about people across socioeconomic circumstances, and about how work, money, housing, and access change what someone can afford to want or risk.

I storyboard to work through possibilities and communicate them with my collaborators. It gives us something concrete to question and develop together. I want the preparation to help me notice what actors, locations, light, and sound bring to a scene, and to stay responsive to what we discover.

Before I was a director, I was a performer. I danced, acted in theater and commercials, and started performing stand-up when I was thirteen. I learned what a room feels like from inside the performance before I learned how to organize one from behind a camera. That still shapes almost everything I do. I tend to begin with what an actor needs, what a body is doing in space, what a character is trying to protect, and what changes when status moves from one person to another.

Most of my work begins with somebody trying to perform stability inside a system that is already failing them. The system might be a military institution, a family, a group chat, a dying town, an algorithm, a relationship, or a workplace. I am interested in the roles people learn to perform in order to survive: competent adult, good wife, provider, patriot, progressive person, artist, friend. The interesting part usually begins when the role stops protecting them.

That is also where comedy enters. I do not think of humor as relief from the serious material. A joke can reveal a hierarchy faster than a speech. A reaction can expose who has power. An awkward silence can tell you which rule everyone in the room understands but nobody wants to say out loud. In my work, the intimate and the structural are usually happening at the same time. A marriage can contain a political system. A group chat can contain a history. A ridiculous argument can sit beside something genuinely dangerous without cancelling it out.

Visually, I think about power spatially. Who gets the center of the frame? Who is blocked by architecture? Who is allowed to cross a room? Who is watched, interrupted, crowded, isolated, or framed by someone else's body? Blocking, lenses, color, production design, costume, sound, and editing are useful to me when they make those relationships physical. I am less interested in a beautiful image for its own sake than in an image that tells us something about how a person is allowed to exist in that world.

Research is a large part of my process, partly because I spent years teaching and writing about film and media. I can get obsessive about history, class, technology, labor, comedy, visual culture, and the way institutions shape behavior. But I never want the finished film to behave like a paper. The research should disappear into the characters, objects, clothes, jokes, architecture, rhythms, and contradictions of the world. If the audience can feel the system without being lectured about it, the research has done its job.

I do not want one house style to flatten everything I make. I work across features, shorts, series, advertising and commissioned work, documentary, and experimental film because different stories want different formal rules. What carries across the work is the attention to performance, social behavior, power, and the strange ways people improvise when the structures around them stop working. I like preparation, clear expectations, and a set where people can still surprise each other. I take the work seriously. I do not think misery is proof that anybody is taking it seriously enough.

My work also digs into the unspoken social tensions in American life. I’m interested in how class, internet culture, and the stories we inherit shape intimacy, friendship, and the way we see ourselves.

Screenwriting, criticism, comedy research, and filmmaking are different forms of the same curiosity: how culture teaches people what to perform, value, fear, and laugh at.

I try to be the producer I would want to work with if I were the director, another producer, a performer, an editor, a gaffer, a PA, or anybody else trying to do good work under pressure. Titles define responsibility. They do not define whose time, ideas, safety, or dignity matter. I do not believe below the line means below anyone.

Because I also direct and perform, I know how quickly bad producing becomes somebody else's problem. Vague priorities become overtime. An unclear budget becomes a department head having to apologize for not having enough. A rushed schedule becomes an actor being asked to find something emotionally difficult before they are ready. A missing post plan becomes an editor inheriting a mess. Good producing is often invisible because the structure is doing what it is supposed to do.

Protecting the filmmaker does not mean pretending the budget is imaginary. My job is to understand what makes the project itself, identify the choices that cannot be lost, and build a structure around them. Sometimes that means spending more on the one thing the audience will actually feel. Sometimes it means finding a cheaper way to accomplish an idea without making it smaller. I want the highest-quality version of the film the budget can honestly support, and I want the crew to have what they need to make it.

I am also interested in the business of independent work because I want the projects I produce to have a life after picture lock. I learned early with #millcore that a small project can make its production money back when the scale and distribution model make sense. I want to replicate that discipline across the work I take on. That means thinking about audience, rights, deliverables, festivals, distribution, marketing, and recoupment while we are still making creative decisions, not after the money is already gone. I do not think independent film has to be economically unserious in order to be artistically ambitious.

My producing work has moved across features, documentaries, shorts, series, advertising and advocacy work, and projects with very different resources. I have worked with grants, crowdfunding, equity, guild agreements, payroll, casting, production, post, festivals, and distribution. I do not need a project to look like something I would direct in order to care about it. The producer's job, for me, is to understand what the filmmaker is trying to make and help them become more specific about that, not more like me.

The throughline is fairly simple: protect the idea, be clear about the money, treat people like adults, and build a process where good work is actually possible. Professionalism and joy are not opposites. A set can be serious about the work, transparent about constraints, respectful of labor, and still be a place people want to come back to.