I’m a filmmaker, educator, and programmer currently based in Iowa City, IA. My practice is at the intersection of experimental film and ethnographic documentary, employing analog techniques alongside ethnofiction strategies to represent affective experience and cross-cultural encounters.
My films have been featured in festivals and platforms across the globe including Chicago Underground Film Festival, Baltic Analog Lab, Experimental Film Festival Process, Moviate Underground Film Festival, Ethnografilm Paris, the National Museum of Kenya, NoBudge, and more. My film Radio Jammer was awarded Best-in-Show at the 2024 Iowa City International Documentary Film Festival. During the summer of 2024, he was an artist-in-residence at the Baltic Analog Lab in Riga, Latvia.
I hold an MFA in Documentary Media and Critical Theory from Northwestern University. I’m currently Assistant Professor of Instruction in the Department of Cinematic Arts at the University of Iowa and Programming Director for the Iowa City International Documentary Film Festival.
Artist Statement
How do the ways we narrate our lives shape the world around us? My body of work poses this question in a number of different communities, locales, and domains. Working at the intersection of experimentation and ethnography, my films engage in highly collaborative and spontaneous co-creation with their participants.
By working with participants to shape the way that their own stories are told, I reject unilateral power dynamics in filmmaking and explore the role of fiction as a response to lived experience. I hope to capture the contrasts and affinities between these fictions and the unexpected events inherent to fieldwork to examine their relationship with the real.
Formally, my films address my own presence as the filmmaker by highlighting gaps of visibility, technical aberrations/artifacts, and out-of-placeness to reflect on tension between subjectivities which occurs in ethnographic filmmaking and explore more sensorial forms of reflexivity. In the dialog my films create between filmmaker, subject, and form, I hope to present a cinematic lifeworld fostering empathy and solidarity.