Funnily enough, all roads lead back to DL1 (or maybe just Ann Arbor in general). I graduated from the Screen Arts and Cultures department in the spring of 2009, and moved in August of that summer to Los Angeles where I’ve been working on a Masters in Cinema and Media Studies at UCLA. The links between what I did while working in DL1 and what I work on now may seem tenuous, but they have a lot to do with approach and attitude rather than subject matter. My research has centered around documentary, war and journalism, particularly the Iraq War, and I explored many of these subjects, rather obliquely, in a performance staged as a GROCS grant recipient, in video projects I worked on the CIntiq, and in the many documentaries I screened, as part of the “Digital Lunch” idea and sporadically, while I was in the space.

While in DL1 I feel like I worked on a lot of things, some I didn’t finish (a stop-motion animation about a hermit crab trying a new shell) and some I did (a lot of work publicizing DL1 online, on Facebook, Twitter and working extensively with the GROCS program, both as a recipient as well as a staff member). One unfinished project, a rotoscoped animation over footage of the 2008 Gaza conflict, has haunted me ever since, but I took the idea and made a film for one of my seminars in graduate school about experimental film and landscape. I’d be happy to share that and the artists’ statement that accompanied it, if you like.
Currently, I’m packing up my life back here to move back to Ann Arbor to start a PhD in my old department, Screen Arts and Cultures, and am pretty excited about being back in Ann Arbor for five years. I’ve missed greatly the access to equipment, editing technology and most of all, expertise that I had at the DMC, and above all, the spirit of collaboration I felt there. I am however approaching my two year sobriety mark from the Panda Bowl.

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