Film is my passion; design is my workhorse. I've straddled these two worlds for over two decades. Filmmaking is layers and layers of design — from the script to the camera to set design. And good design works like a good story — it guides you from beginning to end, invisibly, without friction. Play is the essential ingredient for both. My sketchbooks are where play began for me.
I started keeping sketchbooks in high school. I needed somewhere to put the angst, I guess — somewhere to write reviews of the films I saw, to collect images I found inspiring, to draw the world around me. The sketchbooks built my confidence as a visual artist. They were a conversation with myself.
All of these things, I've realized, are things you can do with AI — and that's what I find thrilling. AI helps you refine, get to the good stuff faster, reduce the resistance that creativity throws up. You have someone to play with.
Writer, Director, Animator
Many of my sketchbooks come from trips to India. And Televisnu is a short film I made in India. When I look at frames from Televisnu I realize the aesthetic comes straight from my sketchbooks — the jewel tones, the intricate patterns connecting two cultures, Indian and the United States. Both these worlds live in me, and living between two cultural expectations has been a huge part of my life and growth.
Televisnu is a short film about how technology gave middle-class women in India a new kind of freedom: the choice of whom to marry, rather than an arranged marriage. The film is a surreal, Alice in Wonderland take on the intersection of Hindu mythology and technology. I wrote, directed, and animated it, building the gods out of motherboards and keyboards.
Official Selection, South by Southwest. Screened at 25+ festivals worldwide, most recently in 2024. National Board of Review Grant, 2011 · Audience Award, Best Short, South Asian International Film Festival, NYC, 2010 · Linda Mabalot New Directors/New Visions Award, LA Asian Pacific Film Festival, 2010 · Wasserman Finalist, NYU First Run Film Festival, 2011
Reviews:
“Televisnu is delightfully bizarre, and was easily my favorite of the category.” - Film Wonk
“My favorite shows were the ones so nuanced they felt like mini features… Televisnu is an inventive fantasy that feels like an Indian Alice and Wonderland.” -Slant Magazine
Website
Lead Designer
In art school, I was lucky to have Arlene Shechet as my sculpture professor at Parsons. Twenty years later, we're still working together — a collaboration that spans her website, a large-scale installation proposal, and most recently her sculptures for the Girl Group show at Storm King.
Since the early 2000s I've designed and maintained her web presence, from hand-coded HTML 4.0 to the current site, which is its fourth iteration. Each version had a distinct aesthetic, inspired by the work she was making at the time.
Director, Editor, Motion Designer, Project Lead
A concept video for a proposed large-scale art installation in Saudi Arabia. I led the creative team — 3D, lighting, landscape, and graphic design — building a 3D environment to visualize how Arlene Shechet's work would live in its site. I directed the vision, edited the film, and created the motion design. The installation was never built; the film is its fullest realization.
Project Lead
Arlene wanted to translate her small-scale ceramic sculptures into large-scale steel works. To do this, I built and ran the system: organizing and documenting remote collaboration with 3D designers, and sourcing the laser-cutting that fabricated the maquettes. I also developed a coloring technique that Arlene used throughout her "Girl Group" show at Storm King Art Center.
Lead Designer
A website I designed for the Spitzer School of Architecture, still in use nearly a decade after launch. I led a small team — an assistant designer and a developer — and using WordPress we built the website from the ground up, working closely with faculty to shape the visual system, structure, and user experience.
Editor
Music has been a huge influence on my life. I grew up in Detroit, where techno was formative for me — and I ended up marrying a techno producer, Sharif Laffrey. We've collaborated for years: I'd design the interior spaces for our parties, he'd program the music, and we'd screen-print the invitations ourselves. Always is one of our more recent collaborations.
A music video for Sharif's single-sided 12" on Berlin's Discos Capablanca. I edited from his eclectic archive — vintage technology films, ethnographic documentaries, Belarusian military footage, English rave tapes, and clips from The New Dance Show, a Detroit public-access dance program. I tried to edit the way the music is made: sampling, cutting, and repeating footage into visual patterns that lock to the track, building a syncopated story out of found images.
The video premiered on Ransom Note, and the record remains a sought-after vinyl years on, still circulating in the DJ and collector scene that defines this corner of dance music.
Writer, Director, Editor, Animator
Lost is another project I collaborated on with my husband. Sharif illustrated the characters and objects in the foreground; I illustrated the backgrounds, wrote and directed the film, and edited and animated it. Lost was commissioned by Topic Studios.
An animated short about a lost dog, two innocent men, and the manufactured fear that turns an ordinary afternoon dangerous. Drawn from a true story.
Editor, Motion Designer
A reel of video editing and motion graphics from the past 15 years. It spans story-driven profile videos, the annual meeting film for NYC Tourism + Conventions (four years running), multi-platform campaign content, title graphics for independent documentaries, high-stakes pitch videos for the financial industry, and editorial content for a luxury fashion label. For Goldman Sachs, I used storytelling to turn complex financial material into something clear and genuinely watchable.