I often use my life and my surroundings as the subject of my work and I embrace autobiographical approaches as a means to examine the larger issues that both intrigue and challenge me. My recent work in 16mm—Porch Film: 76 Day St. Apt. #2 (2004), Windows onto Montebello Road (2009), and Albumleaf (2010)—depicts domestic space as a site for individualized transformative experiences. My use of quotidian images and sounds in these works provides both an emotional register and a contextual grounding in a larger personal, social, or political moment. Taken as a series these works present a creative treatment of lived experiences—places I have occupied and events from my past—that chronicle my development as a human being.

While these film-based works represent my private engagement with the immediate environment, my video works engage in a kind of subjective reportage investigating the effects of mediated experience on personal identity, memory, and history drawn from the public sphere. The recent works – I Covered My Eyes and Repurposed Web Reports distill representations from historical and contemporary public archives, recasting history through a subjective lens, with an eye toward the human capacity for malevolence.

My work in long form essay films began with the experimental documentary approach of This is a Film about Mars. This feature length work measures and surveys ideas about our planetary neighbor, from myth to modern science, allowing for a very open and ruminating interpretation of our current precarious relationship to our terrestrial environment. My current essay film project, a multi-part documentary called Ecotopia: New England, picks up many of the themes of This is a Film about Mars but hypothesizes solutions to our contemporary ecological crisis by imagining the region I live in as an environmentally sustainable utopia. This work will exist as a transmedia project – single channel film, gallery installation, and locative interactive new media project. I see it as an important next step in my creative endeavors.