Multimedia

Digital Storytelling

I have taught digital media and storytelling skills to young people and journalists across multiple continents in six-month classes, week-long workshops and intensive seminars.

Each spring since 2019, I have led a series of digital storytelling workshops with community college exchange students from Africa, Asia and Latin America. I introduced students to the narrative arc story structure, guided them through crafting scripts and storyboards and taught them how to recording voice-overs. The digital story shown here, “I Am Enough,” was created by Gnahoré Toti Emmanuel Dieudonné from Côte d’Ivoire.

Podcasts

For this episode of KQED MindShift, I followed a high school theater class through the tumult of one trimester during the coronavirus pandemic. I used tape from Zoom classes alongside interviews with the teacher, students and an education researcher to bring listeners into the classroom and explore what happens when teachers get real with their emotions.

Although women make up about half the workforce in the U.S., only about a quarter of science, technology, engineering and math professionals are women. As a reporter for LNP Media Group, I launched and hosted a podcast that spotlighted women in careers like bridge engineering, forensic accounting, cancer research and more. Because it tapped into a growing interest in STEM careers and education, the show was the newspaper’s first podcast to land a season-long sponsor.

Photography

  • Faces of Mental Health Recovery

In 2013 and 2014, I facilitated two public art projects that celebrated the resilience of people in recovery from mental illness. During the project, I taught participants basic photography skills, which they used to take each other’s portraits. They then wheat pasted large-scale black and white posters of the portraits onto wooden panels, which were hung outside for a public exhibition. Participants also helped craft the personal narratives that accompanied their photos.

Faces of Mental Health Recovery took place in one rural county and one suburban county as part of the “I’m the Evidence” campaign of the Mental Health Association in PA. The project also received support from the Perry County Council of the Arts, Hopeworx Inc. and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.