I’m an Emmy award-winning independent multimedia journalist 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 that 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 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). 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, WashingtonPost.com, 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 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’ve lectured on or taught 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, the Eddie Adams Workshop, and in journalism classes at UC Berkeley, Columbia, San Francisco State University, and the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. 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.