About

I’m a media producer/director, documentary filmmaker, media installation designer, and video editor. I’ve produced award-winning broadcast and digital media for WGBH, MIT, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, TERC, Apple, Peace River Films, Nova, MetLife, the Forsyth Institute, and the New-York Historical Society, to name a few. I’m available to work with you as a freelance producer, editor, or consultant. For larger projects, I operate through my production company, Essential Stories (www.essentialstories.com.

  • The thread that connects all of this work is storytelling. Whether the subject is a nineteenth-century painter, a contemporary sculptor, a research institute, or a Fortune 500 company, my job is the same: find the people and ideas at the heart of the story and shape them into films, videos, and installations that audiences want to spend time with. The craft travels — the techniques that bring a museum exhibition to life are the same ones that make a corporate brand film, a non-profit fundraising piece, or a public-relations short feel honest and worth watching.

  • As an undergraduate at Pitzer College, I studied the history of ideas and went to Paris, specifically to study the work of Michel Foucault at the Collège de France. I also spent 8 months in Appalachia filming the culture and politics of the region for Broadside Television in Norton, Virginia.

  • At MIT I studied filmmaking with Richard Leacock, one of the founders of the cinéma vérité movement, and interactive media at MIT’s Architecture Machine Group. I also collaborated with video artists at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies on a number of projects, including Music for a Different Time, a multiscreen collaboration with Aldo Tambellini and Vin Grabill. During that period I co-produced and edited A Call For Survival, a television documentary about the nuclear freeze movement, which was viewed on 150 PBS stations across the country. I also co-produced and edited Dario Fo in America, which chronicled Nobel laureate Dario Fo’s first tour performing Mistero Buffo for American audiences. The documentary was aired on WGBH-TV.

  • After completing my studies at MIT, I was invited to work as an interactive producer at the Laboratory for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, where I directed three interactive documentaries: Dans un quartier de Paris, Star Festival, and Interactive Boston. These projects combined cinéma vérité vignettes with interactive maps to allow students to explore a selected neighborhood in France, Japan, and Boston.

  • In 1995 my work in interactive documentaries was spun off into an independent company, Botticelli Interactive, which I co-founded with Shigeru Miyagawa and Ellen Sebring. We expanded Star Festival into an interactive television series called Star Festival Network. The project won numerous awards and was the first multimedia curriculum to be adopted by the Boston Public School System. Page 2 of 4 We also developed a groundbreaking interactive touchscreen exhibit for the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Called the Titian Kiosk, this project was the first to combine touchscreen interactivity with full screen/full motion video to create an electronic analog of one of Titian's greatest works, The Rape of Europa.

  • In 2001 I joined Krent/Paffett/Carney (later known as Experience Design)—a leading museum design firm based in Boston. There I directed a large number of media projects for a variety of clients, including the Mary Baker Eddy Library, DuPont, the New-York Historical Society, the Boston Children's Museum, MetLife, the National Constitution Center, and the Denver Art Museum. I won three AAM MUSE awards during this period. These projects spanned both worlds — corporate communications for clients like DuPont and MetLife, alongside large-scale interactive installations and gallery interpretation for museums and libraries. Some of my best-known media installations during this period include The Well for the Slavery in New York exhibition at the New-York Historical Society, Trade Canoe for Don Quixote at the Denver Art Museum, and the multimedia timeline and microsite for the MetLife Brand Experience exhibition, which celebrated the company’s 140th anniversary.

  • In 2013, I joined the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. My work there included long and short form videos to promote the MFA’s special exhibitions, large-scale media installations, soundscapes, and interactive media. I won two AAM MUSE awards while working at the MFA. More recently my work returned to documentary filmmaking, including Winslow Page 3 of 4 Homer: A Legacy in Watercolor and Encounters with ‘Eternal Presence’, a documentary about John Wilson’s monumental sculpture and its impact on the people of Roxbury, Massachusetts.