I work at the intersection of journalism and cinema; my goal is to let story and visceral presence emerge in every frame. I began my career as a photographer, covering daily news, environmental and political stories in Montana and Northern New Mexico for some of the best newspapers in the region.
Over the past 15 years I’ve worked as a cinematographer, producer and director on films and series for HBO, Showtime, Netflix, National Geographic and PBS in more than 50 countries and in some of the most challenging environments one can take a camera.
From 2018 - 2020, I was Supervising Producer for The Weekly, helping launch The New York Times' first original tv-documentary series, broadcast on FX and Hulu. I also wrote and directed five films for the series and helped guide the visual look for the show. Our first season garnered nine Emmy nominations - winning five of those - and an Overseas Press Club Edward R. Murrow award.
Before that, I was a cinematographer and producer for the HBO nightly news series Vice News Tonight, based in their Middle East Bureau. I covered the fall of Mosul, the on-going war in Afghanistan, the Great March of Return in Gaza, and made two trips to Iran for the series. My work for the series garnered six Emmy nominations - including two nominations and a win for my camera work - as well as an Overseas Press Club Award and a Murrow Award.
From 2011-2016 I was a principle cinematographer for Al Jazeera's flagship current affairs show, Fault Lines. I shot and produced more than two dozen 30-minute documentaries for the program. Haiti in a Time of Cholera, with correspondent Sebastian Walker, charted the UN's cover-up of its deadly role in the cholera outbreak films and was awarded a Peabody in 2014. Soon after the film's release, the UN apologized for its role in the outbreak. In 2016, in another collaboration with Walker, I tracked down survivors of the CIA's torture program in Pakistan, Libya, Belgium and Afghanistan, unearthing previously undocumented abuses and failures of intelligence by the secretive interrogation program.
Other collaborations have included several films with director Steven Okazaki - including the Oscar-nominated HBO documentary The Conscience of Nhem En - and development work on Pete Nicks' first film in his Oakland trilogy, The Waiting Room. I spent a month at sea documenting a crew sailing an experimental catamaran from San Francisco to Sydney, have experience hiding from virtual reality cameras I've placed on disintegrating glaciers, and am adept at filming with hunters on horseback in the snow.
As a cinematographer I’m looking for quiet intimacy, organic and dynamic scenes devoid of tropes, and fresh cinematic ways of capturing this complicated and beautiful world of ours. I prefer to work with a light footprint, shoot most of my work handheld and seek to find that constant balance between reverence and bravery.