WORK 01
Salud (2022)
Summary: After the newly-discovered Fountain of Youth makes immortality widely accessible, a married couple must choose if they really want to stay together until “til death do us part.”
Click the poster or here to watch. (The password to view is Te@mBr@vo2022! )
Runtime: 6 minutes
Artist’s note: I was honored to be selected to participate as a writer during the 2022 Women’s Weekend Film Challenge. The challenge connected me with a crew of nearly 30 women and nonbinary filmmakers, supplied us with generously donated gear and a production budget, surprised us with a randomly-selected genre (Alternate History), a prop we must include (greeting cards), and tasked us with writing, shooting, and finishing a short film in 84 short hours! It was a phenomenal and hectic experience that I feel so lucky to have been a part of. It was my first time collaborating on such a large-scale production, pitching and finishing a script in under 6 hours (!), and formally collaborating with another writer. It was a creative challenge unlike any I had experienced before, and I can confidently say that I grew as a writer from this experience. My co-writer Savannah Lobel, producer Elena Eschleman, director Sarah Abiharb, and I are sending Salud out to festivals this season.
WORK 02
Playbill’s Broadway Bard Party @ NYCC
Summary: A ragtag band of adventurers faces blood-thirsty foes, riddles, and a surprisingly complicated elevator in a quest to recover a rare treasure.
Runtime: 61 minutes
You can find the initial Playbill write-up here, and watch the actual panel here or by clicking the image.
Artist’s note: In the Fall of 2021, I was asked to play a live D&D one-shot adventure alongside several Broadway stars and theatre luminaries for Playbill’s Broadway Bard Party panel at New York City Comic Con. I created a character (elderly Elven Life Cleric/retired nanny named J’ulee Enndrews–legally distinct), had a short test session with my fellow players/performers, and then we all assembled at NYCC to play for a live audience.
I’m submitting this as part of my Gallatin application because what are table-top roleplaying games except for collaborative and improvised storytelling? I hope to study how narrative-driven games (especially games like Dungeons and Dragons) are constructed, how they have morphed to reflect contemporary cultural norms, and the ways in which they are being used therapeutically or to analogize specific psychological phenomenon or relationship dyanmics for a broader audience.
SELECTED NONFICTION
While I have submitted a few samples of my creative work, I wanted to include a bit of nonfiction writing as well. Below you’ll find interviews I conducted while working at Playbill and a reflective essay that I wrote during my time at MoMA as part of my time as a 12-month Digital Learning Intern in the museum’s Department of Education.
- “Post-Pandemic, Cambodian Rock Band‘s Tour Is Ready to Storm the Stage.” Playbill.com, 25 May 2021, https://www.playbill.com/article/post-pandemic-cambodian-rock-bands-tour-is-ready-to-storm-the-stage
For this piece, I interviewed award-winning playwright Lauren Yee and Signature Theatre Artistic Director Paige Evans to talk about the origins of Cambodian Rock Band, how Yee’s groundbreaking play with music was being adapted for a national tour in the post-COVID-19 era, and the significance of the show’s Asian and Asian-American representation in the time of #StopAsianHate.
- “Renaissance Women: Explore the Making of Six’s Band.” Playbill, Sept-Oct. 2021 Issue, https://www.playbill.com/article/renaissance-women-explore-the-making-of-sixs-band
This interview with Six: the Musical‘s American music supervisor Roberta Duchak about the Broadway musical’s unprecedented all-woman band was printed for the Fall 2021 Playbills when Broadway returned to live performances after the COVID-19 shutdown.
- “Art in the Age of ‘So What?’: Using Narrative to Spark Educational Engagement.” Inside/Out, The Museum of Modern Art, 2 June 2015, https://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/2015/06/02/art-in-the-age-of-so-what-using-narrative-to-spark-educational-engagement/
This article, created for MoMA’s staff blog Inside/Out, was from the very start of my career when I was a 12-month Digital Learning Intern at MoMA, and written as the culmination of grant-funded independent research that I conducted as part of my internship. My fellow interns and I had the option to travel wherever we wanted and pursue whatever questions sparked our interest. I decided to travel to California to attend the San Francisco International Film Festival and visit the LACMA and Getty Museums. I wanted to explore the utilization of narrative in educating and informing audiences, both via documentary and VR works (through the festival) as well as in museum spaces. Even though this is a very early piece from the start of my career, I wanted to include it for my Gallatin application because I think it demonstrates how long I have been fascinated with the power of narrative and how it can be used to educate and inspire.
Living Color Productions 