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Undergraduate thesis // Semifinalist in the Student Academy Awards, 2025.
“A Squirrel Turning in its Cage” is an essay film that combines Simone Weil’s early thought with industrial films, image processing, and collecting. Moving between text, textile, montage, absurdist musical, and experimental documentary, the film draws across disciplines to examine questions of labor, art, humor, and the eternal theory/practice divide. LEARN MORE.
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This video piece was inspired by the history of microscopy and the films of JC Mol and Jean Painlevé. It incorporates my own microcinematography imaged at the RISD Nature Lab with found footage from early art animation and Busby Berkeley musicals. It seeks to examine the spectacle of scale and the connections between the human and the non-human.
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I began this project by collecting voice recordings— voicemails from my grandfather, conversations with friends, radio hosts. I then brought these recordings into an audio processing program where I used them to create a set of MIDI tracks to which I could assign percussion instruments. I then assigned to each voice sample a corresponding piece of archival footage based on the topic they are discussing in the sample. To play with this relationship between form (cadence) and content, I toggle both the sonic and the visual in and out of legibility—images become abstracted geometries as speech becomes rhythm. Part of the idea of the piece is the impossibility of full comprehension in terms of content—words slip in and out of being identifiable, always just beyond reach. Instead, one becomes newly attuned to where these slippages occur in larger rhythmic patterns.
Cinematographer for a feature-length narrative film by Lydia Riess.
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This work features origami tessellations which conceal/reveal text when folded/unfolded. In their folding/unfolding each paper becomes a conver- sation between parts of myself which constantly undermine each other. The anxiety-ridden process is manifest in the complex, labor-intensive forms of the tessellations, which become an object of obsession on which the conversation comments. I began by writing the text on an unfolded sheet of paper which I then molded into each of the three tessellations. After folding, I wrote in the red text, which, of course, becomes illegible when the sheet is flat. I then filmed the unfolding and refolding, looped it so as to mimic the hypnotic, inescapable experience of folding, and added back in the sounds of the paper creasing.
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Found footage poem-film using titles from the collection of the Prelinger Archives
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One of two 16mm silent exploratory films.
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One of two 16mm silent exploratory films.
Live Action/Handdrawn Animation. Winner of Scholastic Gold Key (exhibited at the Met). Official Selection of the All American High School Film Festival.
“A Squirrel Turning in its Cage” is an essay film that combines Simone Weil’s early thought with industrial films, image processing, and collecting. The piece relies heavily on intertitles and text blocks. Titles corresponding to the works of Simone Weil evoke the cover art for the first editions of her texts published by Gallimard in the 1950s. Main titles are set in a bold grotesque, quotes are set in simple routed gothic, evoking informational design of the 20th century. Introductory texts to documentary sections are set to evoke the technique and era that the segment engages with— Franklin Gothic for DWRI Letterpress, an 80s-inspired advertising style for the Museum of Broadcast technology, and IBM mono for the Rhode Island Computer Museum.
Select cover and layout designs for a biannual literary journal.
I developed the Immaculate font for the namesake 2024 psychological thriller film, taking inspiration from the film’s subject: Italian manuscripts written by nuns in the 16th century. This involved heavy primary source research and adaptation. Each glyph has built-in alternates to create a uniquely weathered look for any word.
Publicity posters for a premiere of thesis films at the Avon Cinema in Providence, RI
Created in collaboration with Teddy Blanks at CHIPS NY. My work primarily focused on the title treatment, image research, and image manipulation.
I produced this book for a class about figures of global modernism (s). Situating the modernist creative act as one of fragmentation and reinvention I took the texts and objects encountered over the course of the semester and “translated” them into new forms. Pages contain drawings, laser engraved sheets, handcut pieces, woodblock prints, poems, and fragments.
This zine takes up the role of text in graphic novels. I “collected” the text in various works through redrawing it in my own hand with pen and ink, and then scanning the pages in and arranging them digitally. I then created a limited font from each text. The zine highlights the ways in which the form allow text and image to overlap, juxtaposing the “vernacular” type that is included in the image with the writing used for the text in each work, both of which express certain authorial voices and affects. The zine also includes original drawings and collages reflecting on their creation and my own relationship to the graphic novel form.
Zine about the Joe and Lil Shapiro Collection of Laundry Ephemera housed at the John Hay Special Collections Library.
© 2025