ARTIST / FILMMAKER / StORYTELLER
A Thomas J. Watson Fellowship gave me the unique opportunity to celebrate, study and compose music with diverse communities and vibrant cultures around the world. Watson Fellows have three rules: You cannot go anywhere you have been before, you must stay outside of the United States for more than a year, and you must go alone. From Spain to Mongolia and Sudan to South Africa, I sought unusual perspectives, celebrated human diversity and learned to communicate complex experience through art.
I began to produce and direct alongside an Addy, Emmy and Promax gold award winning production team at Stephen Arnold Music. My work now appears nationally and internationally across culturally and politically diverse platforms like the Atlantic Online, the New York Times, Forbes Magazine, Al Jazeera, Huffington Post, the Clio Awards, the Addy’s, Adult Swim, TBS, Fox News, ABC as well as some other, not-so-screen-oriented places.
"Every mind must know the whole lesson for itself -- must go over the whole ground. What it does not see, what it does not live, it will not know."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson, History
"So the world happens twice --
once what we see it as;
second, it legends itself deep,
the way it is."
- William Stafford
A travel journal reads:
“I have come to view the earth and its people as a solitary whole, unconfined by countless borders, cultural differences, plots of soil and ocean waves. The world exists wholly, now for the first time, in a way my mind is insufficient to grasp. I cannot know where the next six months will take me. Why should I expect anything less from my own life?"
[original music inspired by the Watson Fellowship can be heard here.]
