At ABC I became a Production Coordinator with ABC news which I loved. However, I accepted a buyout from ABC because I was becoming tired of watching all of the uncovered political and economic news of underrepresented communities that I watched over the news wires, such as the story of the genocide taking place at the time in Rowanda. What drives me to make film is that what was covered by mainstream media and what I read on the wires and considered important were very different. I talked my way into working as a Line Producer for Apple Production on my first “film”, Love, Lust and Marriage. My career as a freelance producer resulted in film festivals, and one Showtime screening of a short film Tiano. Other freelance work included time spent as the Director of Development for the New York International Latino Film Festival, and writing gigs with trade publications, such as Film Festival Today, and before that the New York Film Monitor.
My perspective as a filmmaker is unique because as a reviewer of films and through interviews with filmmakers at festivals for print and in my capacity as Director of Development of a Latino Film Festival I learned that the greater the level of immersion and personal involvement with a story the more the story of a film, be it narrative or documentary impacted me personally.
As a divorced single mother, tied to New York, and unable to follow contacts to Los Angeles and later Canada, I was a producer for hire. I found a way to break out of that restricted career path by directing and producing my first documentary, Voice of the Faceless a short on 9/11. In VOF, I explored mixing, print, still images, and veritae footage with the inclusion of selected interviews to tell the stories of how young Black pre-teens and teens felt about 9/11 since this was a story I was not seeing on television or in movies, they were without a voice. The short opened at the African Diaspora Film Festival at the Schomburg Museum and continued on to the London Black Film Festival, and various smaller festivals. Shortly after completing this film I made my first visit to Brazil in 2003.
