ABOUT ME
There’s a phrase carved into the wall of the Fine Arts Building in Chicago where I live: “All Passes – Art Alone Endures.” I think about that line every time I walk through its doors. It fills me with both urgency and peace — the reminder that our time here is limited, but that art allows us to leave a trace, a piece of our soul for someone else to see. Art allows us to connect. To feel less alone. And, hopefully, years after I’m gone, help someone feel understood.
My creative life has never been separate from the rest of my life — it’s grown alongside raising children, teaching students, and staying in conversation with the people who make up my world. Those experiences have taught me how to hold complexity: to see strength inside vulnerability, humor inside heartbreak, and beauty inside the ordinary. My work begins there — in the tension between what is visible and what is felt. The subtext of life.
Throughout high school or college, I was always the person at a party with a camera in my hand. Filming and photographing the people I loved helped me feel grounded. It gave me a way to turn observation into connection, to make time feel less slippery. Even then, I think I understood that life is fleeting — that everything is always vanishing, moment by moment. The camera became my way of holding on, of saying: this mattered.
Outside of filmmaking, I find grounding in nature — in daily walks along Lake Michigan with my dog Bowie (named after David, of course), in the shifting light, the ever changing colors of the lake, the shock of the cold Chicago wind filling my lungs. During college, I spent a summer as a Park Ranger intern at Redwood National Park, and that experience changed how I see the world: the scale of it and our place on this planet. That sense of awe continues to guide my art in film and photography. The camera, for me, isn’t about control; it’s about connection — to people, to place, to time itself. It’s how I stay curious, present, and in dialogue with the world as it changes — and as I change within it.
As a filmmaker, I’m drawn to women’s stories and the shifting negotiations of power, identity, and belonging that shape them. I’m less interested in resolution than in revelation — in witnessing what happens when people stop performing and start telling the truth. Whether crafting a documentary or fiction scene, when I direct my goal is allowing for those authentic moments.
My current projects include Re/Construction, a feature documentary exploring body autonomy and the culture of breast reconstruction, and Swimming Through, a short documentary about friendship, resilience, and the cold-water swimming community. Through Green River Films, I continue to collaborate with artists and storytellers who share a belief in authenticity and emotional depth. I also teach filmmaking at Columbia College and DePaul University, where I find inspiration in the next generation’s courage to reimagine how stories are told. Every film, every class, every photograph feels like part of the same conversation — an ongoing attempt to capture a moment that endures.
