Film

  • Aim Skyward

    The healing capacities of nature are of the same essence as our own beauty and creativity. The Archer’s motions of preparation, release, and impact are meditative philosophies that guide our movements through achieving our goals. Aim Skyward turns toward hope and healing by being our brightest, most authentic selves. Its dynamic soundtrack of eight songs guides an emotional arc that corresponds to the blooming flower and the arrow’s flight. The choreographies are situated alongside three onscreen quotes from “The Way of the Bow” by Paulo Coelho. This film is inspired and supplemented by my own poem, “Sky-born,” as well as two paintings, “Blossom Essence” and “Where Air Meets Water,” below.

    Aim Skyward weaves in subtle references to the history of NYC’s beloved Bethesda fountain, with the sculpture Angel of the Waters being the first public art commission in New York City by a woman, Emma Stebbins. An angel holds a flower with four dancing cherubs, figures that represent the qualities of peace, health, purity, and temperance, which the dancers in Aim Skyward bring to life. Rainbow textiles and loving choreography correspond with the statue’s queer history, including speculation that Emma Stebbins modeled the angel after her partner, Charlotte Cushman. Further, this film features dance in Central Park’s famous Sheep Meadow, a place of solace for countless New Yorkers where the iconic city skyline meets vivacious greenery and frolicking crowds.

    A second pair of dancers first enter to the soundtrack of a documentary about photosynthesis from the 1940s, called “Gift of Green.” Aim Skyward coalesces into a montage of blooming flowers, digitally remixed on Hydra, a live coding visual synth, to illuminate their auric and kaleidoscopic essences. This approach is inspired by the watercolors of Swedish artist Hilma af Klint’s Nature Studies, her detailed botanical drawings with abstract diagrams made to reveal “what stands behind the flowers,” toward her conviction that studying nature uncovers truths about the human condition. In all, Aim Skyward draws from the works of Hilma af Klint, Paulo Coelho, and Emma Stebbins to guide the viewer through the arrow’s archetypal flight.

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    Accompanying paintings diptych: Blossom Essence, and Where Air Meets Water
    metallic acrylic gouache on paper, 5"x 7"
    developed as part of the research process for Aim Skyward
    Sky-born

    Archer, in premise near
    arrow flutters forward–

    bitter poison
    lost to wind
    as runner’s breath
    and distant cries
    in thin-winged descent.

    Skyline softens
    in veined constellations
    O heliotrope bloom, steady my draw–
    guide me toward fletched doves
    who roost in wind-worn rafters
    along vine-tangled roads

    Summon me back
    to the soil of care, yielding humility.
    Cirrus petals catching dawn
    innocent precipice of rainbow

    quiet drawback, taut string and arms
    aim my fashioned weapon, breathy
    release into circular destiny
    arc of uncharted return

    Read the poetry chapbook Sky-born is excerpted from, Revenant // Windswept
    Process notebook fragments:

    "On the ground, I wondered if gravity would hold me here forever, or if Earth's circular momentum would take me away. The remaining, grief stricken, look towards the sun as a final trajectory. Only flowers know the littleness of a day; our eyes die to their time."

    "I almost have enough memories to be happy. If only I could revisit them without losing the present. If only I could stay present without them slipping away.     Arrows fly forward without hesitation, but with a preparation akin to underground root networks.

    "Trees draw down their green through winter; what looks like withering returns energy to trunk and root, fueling generative rest and sheltering insects in fallen leaves. A flower bloom emerges from unseen strength: the stalk, like an arrow, grows against the wind; the archer is stronger for it. Plants reveal that the breath, beauty, and nutrients of life dance toward connection, toward intention. Bodies and choreographies, moving forward through time, are always informed by seasonal elements."

  • Gently Attuned

    Gently Attuned is a 3.5-minute screendance duet that softly emanates, exchanges, and releases energy between two dancers. Balletic choreographies of transfer and reciprocal influence embody the emotionally potent language of care. The dancers offer kindness and echo one another through touch and intention, to make visible the powerful impact of subtle care for others.

    We become better people and know ourselves more deeply through seemingly minuscule moments of compassion. The tender glance or touch of another provides comfort and aids healing. So too does embodying positive intentions and appreciation for those we love and the world at large, as we all mutually uplift and honor each other.’Gently Attuned’ reminds the viewer that their own loving kindness is meaningful and important to others.

  • Afterlives

    Afterlives – Trailer

    View full album on YouTube

    Watch Series in order on this site

    Afterlives is a series that walks the viewer through the minds of mortals, bringing together interviews, music, and poetry, dance, and film. Each track touches on life’s most unanswerable, yet compelling, question: What happens after death? Afterlives is in collaboration with over 40 talented artists and interviewees.

    View the full credits list here

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    Afterlives emotionally and tenderly parses through contemporary thoughts on what happens to us after we die. I asked strangers in NYC, California, and Wisconsin, as well as family and friends, what they think happens upon our passing. Watched in order, the series is interspersed with poetry and narrations that arc through life’s journey of contemplation — from loss to spiritual experiences and everything in between. Afterlives makes clear that life is a preparation for death, while aiding the viewer through comfort and reckoning.

    The main ethnographic data is sonic. The ears are the last sense to go when we die; they constantly inform our reality, never blinking. Pythagoras lectured from behind a curtain to take advantage of the ear’s power to listen. Capturing the intimate details of each voice informs the process-oriented methods at the root of this work. I curated interview audios with music, visually accompanied by film of nature and dance. Editing with circularity, repetition, and building of themes adds emotional depth to the spoken sentiments.

    The diverse array of tracks flow between instrumental, discursive, poetic, and emotional. Each track splices together locations, moods, and choreographies that light up the viewer’s own imaginative realms of meditative peace and future dreams, in between one’s physical and spiritual bodies. Oceans and bluffs merge with snowy winters and soft sunsets.

    In the editing process, it became clear to me that each response deserved its full time. The full message and vulnerability of each person’s voice is honored when each response is un-fragmented to highlight each response’s own epistemic merit. I curated them in a series order that blends their voices to coalesce, rather than to obscure the nature of their thoughts.

    The end result is a 90 minute album with 40 tracks, where the soul-touching sentiments of everyday people on the question of mortality are laid in flowerbeds of music, nature, and dance, that resounds strongly with the truths we hold dear, and unknowns we foray into, as living beings who walk this Earth step in step together until every last one of us meets our mortal fate.

  • Disco Ball Funeral

    Created April 2023

    This project was made possible through the production and technical support of the Movement Lab in the Milstien Center of Barnard College.

    Screened with live performance and installation as part of Performance Arts Course at the Undergraduate Arts Showcase in May 2023.

    Disco Ball Funeral is a 7.5 minute film about the death of a romanticized, personified Disco Ball. A murder mystery, the process of uncovering the truth about Disco Ball’s death is emotionally chaotic, like any good funeral. Since his burial was improper, this piece serves as the synchreses of many different memorials that honor his life through sculpture, sound, movement, and ritual. In his physical absence, the film does not dote on his shiny aesthetics. Instead, the meaning of his life is captured through memories of Disco Ball shared in interviews, video footage of his funeral, and photographic memories from his life, alongside interpretive dance and narration that avenges his demise.

    Disco Ball’s reflective and refractive nature, and his creative and connective reciprocity, guide the film’s thematic motifs that explore relationality. He is more than the sum of his audience of friends, through time-transcendent glimmers. Cliche filmmaking styles such as vlogging, public parodies, and collage are satirically employed to comment on humanity’s obsessive materiality and the cognitive dissonance of romantic idealism, particularly within patriarchal norms. Additionally, this piece is imbued with deeper meanings exploring loss, blame, insecurity, justice, closure, and memorialization through this emotionally charged mission to reckon with Disco Ball’s death, at the hands of male violence.

  • Catch Up

    Created April 2023

    This project was made possible through the production and technical support of the Movement Lab in the Milstein Center of Barnard College

    This video, “Catch Up” is an exploration of synchresis, the juxtaposition of multimedia elements, to call upon soundscape, voice, body, and memory in an audio ethnography – mixing hazy dance with an audio montage of Paris, France, voice journals, and more.

    The essay below brings this work into conversation with ideas outlined in the book Sound on Screen by Michel Chion, a French composer, film theorist, and scholar renowned for his pioneering work on the relationship between sound and image in cinema.

    Chion’s ‘image of language’ and the meaning of language as places where the brain first goes point towards a great chasm between the effable and ineffable, as shaped by our perception of it. The relationships between dancing, music, technology, improvisation, and ethnography are of particular interest – how the spatial, temporal, and emotional relationships between these happenings change the nature of the art. It is a synchresis happening on and offscreen, and between those worlds in the temporal and spatial reimaginations that filming/documenting/sharing improvisational, immersive art evokes.

    Dance is so ephemeral, and the kinesthetic empathy that intertwines performers and audiences is so bodily, yet the image of dance involves a translation of that content into form, in a similar way to language. I think dance has powerful potential as a language that is more fit for understanding ourselves and existence– the body can make spatial and visual occupations that are more fully engaging linguistic networks to live within, a physicality that can still fill chambers. Further, ‘the body’ itself is both a gigantic eye, ear, and instrument, amongst other things, which gives it a uniqueness that addresses the aforementioned chasm. These things come to mind as I think in conversation with Chion’s ideas of the ‘eye as more spatial, and ear as more temporal.’ The idea of visual microrhythms, and the (irr)reversibility of image and sound, compels me towards the intersections of technology and magic. 


     Perhaps it is compelling that synchresis, between all sorts of modes of being (what happens when we “rediscover” gustatorial, proprioceptive, vestibular, etc. senses in connective ways?). Here I am compelled towards the intersection of technology and magic, in understanding the infinite immersions, both nurtured and innate, that are synchresistic. What underlying truths can be revealed from synchresis? Which combos are slightly off-putting, seemingly forged from nothingness/randomness, or perhaps feel even more innate (and satisfying?) than the original sound-image relationship itself? This idea is reminiscent of, and a metaphor for, the multiplicities of realities interwoven with perception itself.

    It may be especially uncanny to deconstruct and separate artistic outcomes of these mediums after their creation (technology can also supplant the original divide between mediums, instead of bringing them together supplementally). As Chion discusses regarding horror films – sometimes when sound and image give different information, the composite (reciprocity of added value) feeds a newness back onto itself. In terms of silence – when one records oneself dancing to music, it is most helpful to watch back the video silently, so that the flow of the music doesn’t supplant itself onto the image of dance. Likewise, I think of postmodern silent dances/dance films– so that sound doesn’t alter movement or perception. 

    Thus, to emulate the organic workings of perception, technology, as explored in this video, can stimulate our senses with synchresis of kinesthetic empathy, memory, and linguistic form with moving images, sounds, and environments.

    Chion, Michel. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. Translated by Claudia Gorbman, Columbia University Press, 1994.

  • Splash Again(st)

    Sometimes people feel like fish out of water.

    This short film and visual art piece are components of a performance art work exploring stillness, created for the Performance Art course at Columbia University.

    Created February 2023.

    Splash Again(st) Visual Art Component
    Process — Thoughts on Stillness

  • Upward Spiral

    Upward Spiral is an experimental Screendance documentary that navigates the subjective embodiment of selves, objects, and spaces, forging paths between aloneness and togetherness.

    I created Upward Spiral to explore the subjectivities of embodiment that hover in the gaps between ourselves and the living world: public and private selves, the butterfly effects of pasts, presents, and futures, inner children and adults, responses to life’s traumas and joys, complex growth and simple being.

    First, I worked with cast members one-on-one to create single-shot films that explored how sacred objects, spaces, and routines are embodied within their internal lives. Woven together, these individual experiences portray collective rituals and moods of identity and grounding – as represented by the ‘object-altar’ – where meaning meets material in the body.

    I also collected 43 drawings, where I asked people to draw their response to the question: “How do you feel in your body right now?” During the rehearsal process, my cast and I explored how movement can influence, represent, and be inspired by ‘body drawing’ as a shared mode of articulation. We also played games and journaled to explore where the self changes between in connection, isolation, safety, and freedom – these processes culminated in a series of audio interviews in the film.

    Altogether, the interconnection of many intense subjective experiences guides the audience through a fundamentally human Upward Spiral toward a more articulately embodied togetherness in this experimental film.

    December 2022

    Screenings:

    CoLab Performing Arts Collective Fall 2022 Showcase

    Pop-up: Screendance Showing

    upward spiral

  • Satisficing

    The brain can at times be a mechanical bull that we cling to with one grimy hand. Here, machines of modern convenience and hedonism come into intimate, messy contact with biological and neurotic human behavior. This film, Satisficing, explores resistance, interjection, and compulsion in everyday routines.

    “Satisficing” is a combination of the words “to satisfy” and “to sacrifice” that describes the act of prioritizing realism and momentum, over the exhaustive and paralytic pursuit of perfection. A “satisficer” makes do and moves forward. It’s not laziness or settling — it’s steering and survival.

    In psychology, satisficing pushes back against maximizing, trading endless analysis for quick, workable decisions. In economics, satisficing habits lean into bounded rationality, where time, energy, and information are always limited. In management, satisficers champion progress over perfection. Algorithms mirror human shortcuts to be fast, flexible, and efficient. In evolutionary biology, satisficers ensure survival by balancing resources and risk.

    The nature of organisms, our connections, internal worlds, and the social and technological systems we create are dependent on the satisficer model, in many ways for better and for worse. All great truths are and/both, not either/or.

    This film dives into how satisficing contributes to the neurotic underbelly of the social unconscious inhabited by the individual. Are we messy and scary, to the technology we’ve created to clean us and soothe our fears? How do satisficing and obsessive-compulsive tendencies become more than the sum of their parts for the contemporary individual?

    October 2022

    Screenings: Pop-up: Screendance Showing Fall ’22

  • Species Loneliness

    In reflection of the COVID-19 pandemic, this video explores ‘Species Loneliness’ as defined by Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass: “a deep, unnamed sadness stemming from estrangement from the rest of Creation, from the loss of relationship.”

    Spring 2022

    Screenings:

    CoLab Performing Arts Collective Spring 2022 Showcase

  • Kala

    This experimental dance film was made as an assignment for Text, Magic, Performance at Columbia University, relating to shadow puppet theater in Java, Indonesia, specifically Kala, the demon of time.

    Created Spring 2022