There is more to life than what we think we know and the key to discovering it is through lived experience. My work as a filmmaker and photographer is inspired by my frenzied childhood and a search for belonging in lives I wish I had the opportunity to live out. I grew up a military brat and lived most of my childhood with my mom while my dad was deployed in the Middle East. I bounced from state to state absent from forming meaningful relationships and not a single breath of time to understand who I was. “See ya’ later” was often a goodbye forever. I craved a fresh start, an opportunity to live a normal life, but I learned that there was more beauty in the life I knew than I expected.

My work has become very introspective in recent years. The stories I choose to tell come from thoughtful reflection of my past and where my values come from. I tend to explore the reasons for why I hold certain beliefs and then question those beliefs through creative processes. They stem from my catholic background, anxiety induced paranoia, and lack of belonging in every space I entered. As I work through those memories I discover the beauty in what they have empowered me to create. I am inspired by memory and the way we can reshape the perception of our past. My favorite film of all time, The Holdovers (2023), has become an anchor for how I envision my past. I don’t see my childhood as this distant memory, rather, a living and breathing story told by countless other authors in their own, individual work in different time periods. I create to make sense of things that can’t be explained with words and the camera is the device that captures it perfectly. I observe more than I interact, taking snapshots mentally and physically, from a unique perspective on life. Belonging is really only found from within, which filmmaking and photography have allowed me to understand.