Director

My first films were Super 8 and 16mm projects at the DeAnza College Film Department in Cupertino, California. I studied film history and experimented with short form ideas including animation and music videos. After completing my Associate of Arts degree at DeAnza, I studied in an interdisciplinary program called Creative Arts at San José State University in San José, California. At SJSU, I continued to explore filmmaking and also branched off into writing, theatre, art history, and performance art. As an Honors Project in Theatre, I directed a short 16mm dance film titled Waking Up Strange with music by The Doors (with written permission from Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek). Between my Bachelor of Arts at SJSU and graduate school at Columbia University, I wrote and directed an hour-long drama called Serving Time, which was later broadcast on several PBS stations. The graduate program of the Film Division at Columbia University is toward the Master of Fine Arts in Screenwriting/Directing. I wrote and directed numerous projects while there, including class projects which involved using the scripts from established films. The goal was to use writing that was already proven to work, and use that material to develop directing chops.  These student works are included here to give indication of how I have developed my aesthetic, and along the way, tipped my hat at the influence of various masters in filmmaking.