M.F.A. Film/Animation/Video, University of Illinois at Chicago
B.A. Philosophy, California State University, Northridge

• BIAS177: Introduction to Making Media
• BISMCS 234: Reimagining Documentary
• BISMCS 240: Introduction to Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
• BISMCS 341: Japanese Cinema, Theater, Novel and Manga
• BISMCS 343: Visualizing Absurdity
• BISMCS 472: Competitive Filmmaking
• BISIA 475/MCS 475 Global Media Lab

Without a doubt, my teaching philosophy emerges from my experience as a filmmaker. Through my camera, I have documented survivors of the U.S. prison system, refugees from Southeast Asian wars, Muslim American performance artists, Cambodian deportees, Palestinian poets, and African American civil rights warriors. These collaborations have revealed complexity, trauma, aspiration, and hope. The commitment to bringing stories from the margins into the center informs my teaching as I encourage students to make their voices heard through media-making. I strive to create a classroom where experimentation, critical inquiry, and personal storytelling flourish within a supportive community.

Central to my pedagogy is the belief that collaboration expands artistic vision and intellectual possibility. In Competitive Filmmaking, students created Delirium, an award-winning short film conceived, produced, and shot remotely during quarantine by a team of eight students. Inspired by the poetry of Botswana writer Tjawangwa Dema, students interpreted the work through their own experiences of isolation. The project embodied a principle I teach consistently: limitations are not deficits but creative opportunities. If you only have two colors, make a two-color painting. If you do not have a lead actor, build a story around their absence. Students learn to transform restrictions into aesthetic and conceptual strengths.

This philosophy extends into advanced production courses such as Global Media Lab where students collaborate to realize ambitious creative visions using ingenuity and resourcefulness. Whether constructing immersive environments from found materials or developing films under significant constraints, students learn to dream expansively while acquiring the practical skills needed to realize those dreams.

I am equally committed to both artisanal and digital approaches to filmmaking. Students learn industry-standard technologies while engaging hands-on methods that deepen conceptual thinking. In Intro to Motion Pictures and Sciences, students build simple zoetropes from everyday materials to understand the foundations of motion perception. In Reimagining Documentary, they transform ethnographic interviews into hand-crafted shadow-puppet films. Animation plays a particularly important role in my teaching because it cultivates students’ ability to create and interpret metaphor rather than simply consume images. It becomes a space for imagination, experimentation, and the construction of entirely new worlds.

My expertise in Japanese and world cinema provides students with a global framework for understanding film as a transnational art form. By tracing creative exchanges across cultures, students learn that artistic innovation often emerges through dialogue, adaptation, and cultural intersection.

Ultimately, I provide students with the critical, historical, and ethical frameworks necessary to create meaningful work. Alongside filmmaking craft, I ask students to consider the responsibilities of representation, the ethics of storytelling, and the potential of media as a vehicle for social change. Through individualized mentorship, I work to cultivate each student’s unique artistic voice while helping them grow as filmmakers, critical thinkers, storytellers, and global citizens.

Film & Cinema Studies, Animation, Studio Arts (Filmmaking, Interdisciplinary Arts, Digital & New Media, Photography, Installation, Public Art), Contemporary Art, Asian American Studies, American/Ethnic/Cultural Studies, Diaspora/Global Studies, Japanese/Asian Studies

As a filmmaker, two principles drive my creative practice. The first is to challenge conventional narratives of identity through authentic and emotionally resonant storytelling. The second is to pursue forms of expression that explore what it means to exist as both individuals and as part of a larger collective. Together, these principles guide all of my work.

The first principle emerges from my lived experience as an immigrant of a minoritized community in the United States. It compels me to address marginalization not as an abstract subject but as a deeply personal one that shapes both my present and the future of my children. My work is grounded in the belief that liberation is collective. As Aboriginal artist Lilla Watson famously stated, “If you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” This sense of interconnectedness lies at the heart of my creative and collaborative practice.

My second principle, the search for meaning between the individual and the collective, expands this commitment beyond identity alone. It drives my examination of human experience from an inclusive and intersectional perspective, connecting personal struggles to broader social realities. Through Studio Revolt Media Lab, I helped pioneer the spoken-word video form, merging cinematic language with poetry to create works capable of reaching broad audiences while centering voices often excluded from mainstream narratives. My films have featured stories from Palestine, the Marshall Islands, Botswana, Cambodia and the U.S.

This approach culminates in “Cambodian Son,” my feature-length documentary on poet Kosal Khiev. Screened internationally, the film has connected with audiences ranging from suburban communities in Oklahoma to young people in Indonesia. Their responses affirmed my belief that art experienced through complexity, empathy, and emotional engagement can often reach across difference more effectively than traditional forms of activism.

In every film I create, I center stories from the peripheries. My work creates spaces where those who have been othered are able to speak, dance, imagine, and exist in their full humanity. Through visual storytelling that is both emotionally and intellectually engaging, I am challenging cultures of exclusion and foster deeper forms of connection and understanding.