When I was young, my family traveled for work, so I spent many of my formative years living overseas, first in London, England, and then in Moscow, Russia. My apartment complex in Moscow was an international melting pot, and I spent my time after school playing soccer and hide-and-seek with the sons and daughters of Iraqi businessmen, South Korean engineers, American journalists, and Russians of all professions. These daily interactions with this diverse group awakened a passion of mine that has only grown with the years: To get to know people whose lives are different from mine, and to explore their concerns and their joys.
After high school, I went across the country to Portland, Oregon to attend Reed College, a small liberal arts school with a reputation for attracting unorthodox students with often obscure interests. Upon graduating, I got involved with KBOO, Portland’s iconic community radio station. I worked my way up from volunteer to newsroom assistant to news reader to finally becoming a beat reporter. This was my first real introduction to narrative multimedia storytelling, and I savored the days in the field collecting interviews and other audio, and the nights spent in front of my laptop patching the pieces together into an expressive portrait of whatever subject I was working on at the time. While at KBOO, I enrolled in workshops at Northwest Documentary to learn video production, and passed on my skills to other students as an instructor at the Northwest Institute for Social Change.
These experiences ultimately led me to move across the country again to The Nation magazine, where I now work as Multimedia Editor. New York has been an education for me: With my cameras, I have covered Occupy Wall Street, Superstorm Sandy, and undocumented Dreamers, and have worked alongside some of the best advocacy journalists while doing so. I now live in Chinatown in Manhattan and ride my bike to work every day.