• Areas of
    Expertise

    click on the circles
    for details

    Documentary Film and TV

    Video Production

    Animation Production

    Game
    Design

    Presentation Design

    Data Visualization

    About
    Me

    Contact
    Me

  • Documentary Film and TV  

    women peacebuilders
    I produced "Peace by Peace: Women on the Frontlines" with Director/Producer Lisa Hepner, and we secured Oscar-winning Jessica Lange as narrator, as well as an award-winning crew: editor Kate Amend (Oscars), composer Miriam Cutler (Emmy, Grammys, Cines, Peabodys), Sandra Chandler (Emmy nom's), and Judy Karp (Emmy). The documentary was the brainchild of Peace x Peace founder Patricia Smith Melton, and profiled the courageous work of ten women peacebuilders in Afghanistan, Burundi, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Argentina and the United States. The feature version premiered at the United Nations on October 30, 2003 (thanks to Noeleen Heyzer and UNIFEM), and the television version aired on PBS in 2004. The film was awarded a Cine Golden Eagle in 2004 and an Aurora Award (Platinum Best in Show) in 2005.
    mixed race women
    "Beyond Black and White" is my first documentary, made possible by the Senior Documentary Film Grant Award at Ithaca College. This 26-minute, 16mm film explores the complex mixed-race identities of myself and five other women, all half white and half non-white, and sets the issues in am historical American context via film clips. The film had its debut at the 1995 Asian American International Film Festival, and is in educational distribution with Women Make Movies.
    other programs
    After completing my own documentary (see above), I worked as a production coordinator on "Walk This Way", a documentary with creative animation sequences about nine children's experience of difference, for USA Network's "Erase the Hate" campaign.
    During the editing and post production of my own film, I was working as a post-production assistant on Jennifer Fox's An American Love Story, about an interracial family, that became a multi-part PBS series and theatrical release.
    In between longer production jobs, I worked as a researcher on television documentaries, such as the Muslims and America episode of Morgan Spurlock's "30 Days" series, and for producers such as Bill Einrenhofer and Marnie Inskip.
    My first job out of college was working as an Associate to the Executive Producer at a non-profit documentary organization that produced multi-part series for PBS broadcast, as well as international television and educational distribution, on American arts and culture, such as the ten-part American Cinema series, and programs on authors like William Styron.

  • Video Production  

    event videos
    So much time, energy and money goes into the preparation and execution of performances, conferences, shows and other events, and I believe that such events should be well covered and preserved via video, for others to watch, enjoy or learn from. I've become very adept at multi-camera shooting and editing, as well as preparing videos for web displays. While in graduate school, I videotaped the incredibly fascinating 2009 NIME and 2010 NIME shows (NIME = "New Interfaces for Musical Expressions"), and other experimental music shows curated by ITP grads, such as Ari Joseph's Audio Ergo Sum and Winslow Porter's 2010 GeekDown and 2011 GeekDown shows. ITP has a public show every semester which features a melange of mobile and interactive art and tech pieces. I shot quick bits of footage of as many projects as I could for the 2010 Spring Show and organized/uploaded all the footage shot for the 2010 Winter Show.
    One of my ITP project collaborators, Minette Mangahas, with whom I created "Gastronomica",, a cultural food video piece for a Big Screens show at the IAC, introduced me to the world of taiko drumming during the summer of 2010. We shot the riveting Soh Daiko performance at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden and I edited each of the pieces.
    I originally became passionate about the documentation and preservation of events while working at the ICTJ. During my four years there, I videotaped (usually manning two cameras by myself) and edited a number of conferences, workshops, lectures, book launches, and other events, which I archived internally at ICTJ and for Duke University's Archive for Human Rights.
    video interviews
    I've always enjoyed learning about people's lives through video interviews, which gives them the opportunity to reflect and articulate important moments and stories. I filmed interviews with five mixed-race women for my first documentary, and videotaped profile and in-the-moment interviews with many devoted amateur adult competitive figure skaters for a documentary that I'm working on completing. For ICTJ, I taped traditional and to-camera interviews with experts on topics such as reparations and criminal prosecutions, and also taped interviews with transitional justice fellows, experts, victims and perpetrators in Uganda, Liberia and South Africa. I've also been hired to field producer interviews for the syndicated news network, NewsProNet, for whom I interviewed a range of New York City-based professionals.

  • Animation Production  

    pre-school television series
    I'm honored to have been included in the producers, directors, writers group that won a Daytime Emmy in 2004 for Outstanding Children's Animated Program on Nick Jr's "Little Bill", based on Bill Cosby's children's books. I was hired in 1998 at the very beginning, and was promoted multiple times to Coordinating Producer during the course of this 52-episode digital animation series, which completed production in early 2002. For the series, I worked closely with the supervising producer on production strategy presentations and updates to the network, as well as the troubleshooting of scheduling and management issues on the production. I handled all the budgets and cost reports, and managed the production office. I also handled the hiring, promotions, and contracts for all "below-the-line" staff. And being involved in the casting selections and voice recording sessions was a treat. At one of the celebration parties, I even sewed up a Little Bill shirt for the 7-year-old boy who voiced him.

  • Game Design  

    augmented reality
    This is a newer area of interest for me, which began at ITP. In the Spring of 2010, I collaborated with computer science whiz, Craig Kapp, to create PairBurst, an augmented reality memory matching game that we designed for kids at RUSK. For PairBurst, I came up with the game concept, designed and animated the characters in Flash, designed the fiducial markers and made the game board. I also videotaped the user testing session, edited a short explanatory video, and designed the website.
    game incorporating video clips
    In the Fall of that same year, I took a class called Games and Art, co-taught by Amit Pitaru and Zach Gage. They gave us a number of constraint-based one-week assignments that challenged us to break or alter traditional game mechanics, and get into the practice of user-testing and iterating based on feedback. One of the games I created that people really enjoyed playing utilized video interviews that I shot with strangers, asking them about their favorite foods. The game plays with the player's pre-conceptions about what people eat, based on appearances, and also tests players listening skills and memory.

  • Presentation Design  

    materials for TEDx
    Leading up to TED's 2011 global conference in Scotland, I freelanced with the TEDx team to curate, design and produce a hand-finished, printed photo booklet that was given as a gift to the TEDx organizers. I also designed and produced an eco-friendly luggage tag for the gift bags. At the conference, there were dedicated areas with monitors for display, so I also selected and compiled photo and video loops featuring TEDx events.
    materials for ICTJ
    During my four years at ICTJ, I created tons of PowerPoints: presentations to key funders, presentations for conferences and workshops, and interactive Flash-like interfaces for use as toolkits or indexes on reference discs. I also designed and formatted two toolkit booklets. Photos were used in all types of materials, and I thus uploaded and organized a Flickr gallery of over 5,000 photos, as well as taking hundreds of photos myself on a Nikon D40. (See the Video Production circle for details on my video documentation work for ICTJ.)

  • Data Visualization

    visualizations of image and sensor data
    My ITP thesis, Co-Crabitation, was a multi-faceted project that resulted in a data visualization of hours and hours of sensor and image data that I collected on a vivarium that I set up for monitoring. I created several Processing sketches: one that recorded sensor readings from a gas sensor circuit in combination with video images from four webcams and four infrared cameras; one that allowed me to view all the recorded data and add custom tags to image sequences; and one that read all the tagged data and visualized it based on time.
    map-based visualizaions of statistical data
    In the Spring of 2010, I took a class called Telling Stories with Data, Sensors and Humans, taught by Nick Bilton of the NY Times. We covered different styles of visualization, from static ones created in Illustrator to interactive ones created in Processing. My final for the class took data that I collected, analyzed and categorized from different sources on college funding and plotted the results on a map with a legend. We got to meet some amazing guest speakers, including Dennis Crowley of FourSquare, Nicholas Felton of Daytum, Mike Driscoll of Dataspora, and Gilad Lotan of Microsoft R&D, and tour the R&D division of the NY Times.
    powerpoint slides of financial and staff data
    For the various presentations that I created for the key funders (see Presentation Design for more info), I needed to translate financial information and other stats on the organization into visuals that conveyed, in a glance, the impact of growth or change, while also containing details for longer looks. Aside from more conventional charts and graphs, I designed more creative interpretations featuring photo collages and simple illustrations.

  • About Me  

    overview of my experience
    Greetings! I am an Emmy-winning television producer and a Masters graduate from New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP). I recently completed a photo/video/design consultancy with the TEDx team at TED and am now developing interactive projects.
    ITP was a wonderful whirlwind. I explored data visualization with image sequences and gas sensor data, gestural interactions using the Kinect, the production of video content for a humongous screen, augmented reality and Flash video games, community features of recently launched online social media sites, Android application development, design solutions for sustainable power in sub-saharan Africa, and much more.
    I traveled to three countries in sub-saharan Africa, doing video production and training work, while working at a global human rights organization (the International Center for Transitional Justice). I worked there for four years as a Media and Materials Producer, and then worked on an archiving project (during my first year at ITP) to preserve the thousands of photos, videos and other materials that I created or acquired during my time there. My interest in global human rights began while I was working as a producer on a feature documentary profiling courageous women peace-builders around the world. "Peace by Peace: Women on the Frontlines," directed by Lisa Hepner and narrated by Jessica Lange, premiered at the United Nations, aired on PBS, and won several awards, including a CINE Golden Eagle.
    Multi-cultural themes formed the core of the productions that I worked on prior to PxP and ICTJ. "Little Bill," created by Bill Cosby, centered around the life of a young African-American boy, his family and his diverse group of friends. I worked intensely and collaboratively on that Nick Jr. digital animation series for three and a half years, and after the production of 52 half-hour episodes, I was included in the Emmy-winning producing/directing/writing group as a Coordinating Producer. I had started to prepare for a role as a producer on the previous production I worked on: a documentary with drawn and stop-motion animated sequences called "Walk This Way", about nine children's experiences of difference for USA Network's "Erase the Hate" campaign. I related quite well to the experience of difference, being a child of a mixed marriage, and my first documentary, "Beyond Black and White,", compared my background and views on multi-racial identity with those of five other mixed-race women. This 16mm film was launched with a Senior Documentary Film Grant Award at Ithaca College, where I earned a BFA in Film, Photography and Visual Arts and the Dean's Award for the School of Communication. For more details on my work background, check out my LinkedIn profile.
    In my "spare" time, I try to keep up with figure skating, yoga, dance classes, and organic vegan raw foods. In the past, I've also indulged in furniture design and construction, and clothing/costume design and sewing. I also enjoy having my mind blown by conceptual, interactive, multi-sensory art.
    about this website
    I originally thought I would code this from scatch but that would've taken much more time than I had available, so I looked for a template that most closely matched my design/concept and adapated this site from it. I chose a Template Monster template.
    I looked through dozens of social networking icon sets and chose the ones created by Komodo Media.
    For the circle icons, I decided to use Apple's Finder icon for the home circle, to indicate that I work on an Apple laptop (MacBookPro) and software logos (Final Cut Pro, Premiere, After Effects, Flash, PowerPoint, Processing) to give you a sense of some of the software I've become proficient with. Of course, I use much more software than what is indicated.
    Please use the Contact Me form to send me feedback on the site. Thanks!

  • Contact Me  

    I currently reside in Montclair, NJ but commute frequently into the city. (People always ask me, are you from NJ? NO. I grew up in Ithaca, NY and moved to Manhattan immediately after graduating college. I lived in three different apartments in the city, the longest stretch being in Chelsea. I moved to Montclair in 2008 but I consider it temporary, as I want to move back to Manhattan or Brooklyn.)

    see where Montclair is
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