Since graduating from the AFI Conservatory, I have worked as a documentary director, producer and editor. My films have aired on the PBS series Independent Lens and American Reframed and have been seen at film festivals around the world, including Sundance, SXSW, New Directors, New Films and DOC NYC. I have received many awards for my work including a Poynter Fellowship in Journalism at Yale University in 2023.

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My recent feature documentary MISSING IN BROOKS COUNTY (2022), a collaboration with filmmaker Jeff Bemiss, is about the migrant death crisis along the U.S./Mexico border. The film received funding from PBS and was Executive Produced by Abigail Disney. MIBC was released theatrically in the summer of 2021 and aired on the PBS series Independent Lens in January 2022. It has broadcast on PBS stations around the country over 3,000 times and continues to have a robust impact campaign in places like Washington D.C., Texas, Latin America and Europe.

 

MIBC won a Peabody Award as well as over 20 film festival awards, was nominated for a Critics Choice Documentary Award and was a finalist for the Dupont-Columbia University Award for outstanding journalism. ​
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I spent the spring of 2019 on a Fulbright Scholarship in Toronto working on the award-winning documentaries SAFE HAVEN (2022), a feature film about U.S. war resisters seeking asylum in Canada, and SOLEDAD (2020), a short about an asylum case. Both films are distributed through the film collective New Day Films where I recently served on the steering committee for two years.

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Some of my other films about the Southwest are the award-winning shorts TEACHING IN ARIZONA (2018) and THE CLEANERS (2017).

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SCHOOL’S OUT (2014) about a forest kindergarten near Zurich, Switzerland, premiered on the PBS, won best short at several film festivals, and was written about on Slate.com and in The Atlantic and National Geographic. With screenings at over 100 film festivals and public screenings around the world, SCHOOL’S OUT sparked a movement among early childhood educators to set up their own versions of an outdoor kindergarten. 

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My directing debut THE HILL (2013), about the demolition of a mostly African-American neighborhood in New Haven, CT, a city I lived in for 12 years, premiered on America Reframed. Yale University and New Haven community groups still screen the film on a regular basis.

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​I am currently working on a new feature documentary THE FIRST BIRDMAN about a German immigrant named Gustav Whitehead who may have flown a plane two years before the Wright Brothers in 1901and one man's lifelong quest to prove that Whitehead was first in flight.

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In addition to filmmaking, I have taught filmmaking at Yale University, Wesleyan University, Colorado College, Trinity College and currently at the School of Theatre, Film and Television, the Human Rights Practice Program and the James E. Rogers College of Law at the University of Arizona. I am also affiliate faculty of the Latin American Studies Program there. 

 

Since 2021 I have been supervising University of Arizona student interns on a series of short documentaries and a feature about archaeology in Tucson. Here is a link to a few of the short films which aired on our local PBS station. And here is a short I recently produced about the world of semiconductors with some animation students at the university.​