About

I am currently a Ph.D. candidate in sociocultural and visual anthropology at New York University, where my research engages mobility studies, social geography, theories of place and space, memory, cartographies, ecology, digital media, visual culture, video ethnography, personhood, material culture, art, religion, secularism, and pilgrimage. 

As a filmmaker, I follow the complexities of social life. My work is dialogical—engaging with diverse perspectives on humans’ entanglement with place, movement, and material life. I think about and reflect on the privilege of being a white, cis-gender storyteller and researcher from the West, embracing collaborative, pedagogical projects that reimagine the idea of collective authorship and creative community. I am currently working on several multimodal projects: Mobile, an interactive documentary project that features Learning from Lhagva, a short film about the impact of new media technologies on Mongolian nomadic women; CROSSINGS, a participatory media and memory mapping project that incorporates Holding Space, an experimental documentary short about the Camino Francés, a pilgrimage route traversing the north of Spain; and Cemetery of Things, a short documentary about Dead Horse Bay, a trash site in Brooklyn (produced in conjunction with the Center for Culture and Media at NYU). I am the Director, Creative Director, and DP of Nine-Story Mountain, a feature-length documentary film about the pilgrimage to and around Mount Kailash, a sacred mountain in western Tibet.

As a proponent of the trend toward open access within academia, I am committed to finding accessible outlets to share my research findings; and my writing and photographs have appeared in journalistic spaces, such as The Huffington Post, The Daily Beast, Elle Canada, Women in the World, the New Internationalist, Geographical Magazine, Al Jazeera English, Sapiens, and Wellesley Magazine. As a co-founder of The Walking Collective, I helped to produce podcast episodes and co-developed Dispersal, a journal exploring the interdisciplinary potential of walking as a research and pedagogical tool.

My films and multimedia collaborations have screened internationally at the Kathmandu International Mountain Film Festival; The Art and Tourism Film Festival in Porto; the Brisbane Himalayan Film Festival; the University of British Columbia; The Greenwich Village Film Festival; Tibet House; Oxford University; Harvard University; New York University; Ladakh Arts and Media Organisation (LAMO); the Mariposa Museum; and New York’s WILD Film Festival, among others.

I received my B.A. from Oxford University in 2014, and lived in Ladakh, India, from 2014-2015, as a Fulbright-Nehru Student Researcher, where I both facilitated a museum research project with Ladakhi youth and co-directed a video workshop with Tibetan refugees. I have received post-production grants from the Lucius and Eva Eastman Fund and nextPix; a MacCracken fellowship from New York University; and research grants from the Peter Lienhardt Bagby Fund (Oxford University); the Oxford University Expeditions Club; The Royal Geographical Society (with IBG); the Soddy Trust; the Koerner Foundation; the Adrian Ashby-Smith Memorial Trust; the Scientific Exploration Society; the Explorer’s Club; and the American Center for Mongolia Studies (declined). From 2017-2018 I was a Spiritual Ecology Fellow with the Kalliopeia Foundation. And my doctoral research on the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage has been funded by the Council for European Studies, the SVA/Lemelson Foundation, Fulbright, the Institute for Pilgrimage Studies, the Wenner Gren Foundation, and New York University.