I’m an award-winning independent multimedia journalist, writer, editor, and filmmaker born and raised in Kailua, Hawaiʻi. I worked in the journalism world for more than two decades in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond. During the summer of 2023 I moved with my family back to Hawaiʻi — we landed in Haʻikū, 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 that experience in a personal essay for The Atlantic. I’m now writing a series of essays for Hawaiʻi Public Radio called “Postcards” and I’m working on a book — a reported memoir about the complex histories of the many Hawaiʻi places where I’ve lived.

My other 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.

Before I went freelance, I was Senior Multimedia Producer at the Center for Investigative Reporting, where I led digital storytelling projects for six years. I pioneered and produced CIR’s groundbreaking animated journalism features, including the national Emmy award-winning “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). While at CIR, I also managed multimedia production for The Civil Rights Cold Case Project, The Chauncey Bailey Project, and The Price of Sex.

Prior to my time at CIR, I was a magazine and book editor, newspaper reporter, video journalist, and travel book author. My work has also been featured online at MotherJones.com, Poynter, Reveal, Wired, PBS Newshour, Grist, AlterNet, Current TV, and in print publications including California magazine, The Honolulu Advertiser, and others. My specialty is crafting 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.

During the 2023-2024 school term I was an Asper Visiting Professor at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, where I taught a multimedia workshop and lectured on digital storytelling, disaster journalism and memoir. I’ve also guest lectured and/or taught multimedia at UC Berkeley’s Knight Digital Media Center, the Journalism & Women Symposium (JAWS), the Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA) Convention, SF Web Fest, the Eddie Adams Workshop, and in journalism classes at UC Berkeley, Columbia, and San Francisco State University. I’ve 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.