I’m an Emmy award-winning independent multimedia journalist and filmmaker born and raised in Kailua, Hawaii. I worked in the journalism world for more than two decades in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond. Last summer I moved with my family back to Hawaii — we landed in Haiku, Maui. Twelve days after we arrived on Maui, the island was swept by deadly wildfires. I reported on the fires with NBC’s Digital Documentaries team, and a year later I wrote about the experience in a personal essay for The Atlantic. I’m now working on a book, a reported memoir that examines the legacies of colonialism throughout the Hawaiian Islands and the relationship between colonialism and climate change.

My recent projects include an illustrated documentary series for VICE News called Correspondent Confidential, an animated feature for ProPublica, and an explanatory video for the Pulitzer Prize-winning Panama Papers project created by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). I was Senior Multimedia Producer at the Center for Investigative Reporting, where I led digital storytelling and multimedia projects for six years. I pioneered and produced CIR’s groundbreaking animated and graphic journalism features, including the national Emmy award-winning short web documentary “In Jennifer’s Room.” The multimedia features I directed and produced for CIR were also honored with a duPont-Columbia Silver Baton, a Gracie Award, a national Sigma Delta Chi Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and were featured in several large projects recognized by awards from the Online News Association (ONA) and Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE). My multimedia projects have also been featured online by NPR.org, The Huffington Post, Rolling Stone, Grist, Time.com, Fast Company, the Los Angeles Times, KQED, PBS NewsHour, Salon.com, Mother Jones, Public Radio International, and Columbia Journalism Review, among others. While at CIR, I also managed multimedia production for The Civil Rights Cold Case Project, The Chauncey Bailey Project, and The Price of Sex. My specialty is crafting powerful character-driven narratives that experiment with video, audio, photography, animation, and interactive graphics to push the boundaries of storytelling on the Web and other platforms.

Prior to my time at CIR I was an editor at California magazine, Mutual Publishing, and AlterNet.org; creator and founding editor of WireTap magazine (AlterNet’s Webby award-winning online youth news magazine); reporter for the Honolulu Advertiser and stringer for several daily and weekly newspapers; freelance video journalist for Washingtonpost.com and Current TV; writer for Current TV’s hosted news comedy show, Google Current; author of two travel and culture books about Hawaii; and fact-checker at Mother Jones magazine. I was a 2015 National MediaMaker Fellow at the Bay Area Video Coalition, where I focused on development of Hawaii on the Rocks, my animated feature documentary film about the crystal meth epidemic in Hawaii. I was on the Eddie Adams Workshop faculty as a multimedia producer working with MediaStorm to teach digital storytelling techniques to photojournalism students, and I’ve lectured on multimedia storytelling techniques at UC Berkeley’s Knight Digital Media Center, the Journalism & Women Symposium (JAWS), the Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA) Convention, SF Web Fest, and in journalism classes at UC Berkeley, San Francisco State University, and the University of British Columbia School of Journalism, Writing and Media. I’ve also served as a reader, reviewer, or judge for the duPont-Columbia Awards, the Online Journalism Awards, and the BAVC National MediaMaker Fellowship. In 2005 I completed a master’s degree in journalism at UC Berkeley, where I worked under the guidance of Michael Pollan and Adam Hochschild on magazine writing and narrative nonfiction. See a list of my awards and press clips about my work.