My purpose as a filmmaker and writer is to create works which delight, inspire and challenge audiences to find insight into the bewildering and stupendous world around us.

As my work matures, it is the audiences I keep in mind more than ever. To delight them with humor and emotional depth, to inspire them with imaginative uses of the medium, to challenge them to participate in the ideas offered and make new connections that resonate in their daily lives. It is a great satisfaction to engage with people whom I would ordinarily never encounter - the college student and professor at a midwestern university, the rural farmer, the group of city children on a field trip to a museum, the middle aged suburban mom at a show with her daughter.

It’s been during small community screenings where I’ve seen the complicated ways in which an interested group of people are moved or provoked by an independent work that shows them their lives, and speaks to them directly in ways that corporate media cannot. Even though independent media thrives at the margins and in the cracks of the mainstream, it remains remarkably diverse and reflective of the range of our actual experience. It creates a much-needed space where people feel encouraged to become part of the process of understanding and creating a dialogue about the unconventional perspectives that the makers usually offer.

This desire and need for participation and mutually shared interest, along with the current which flows between audience and artist is particularly liberating. My subject matter ranges widely, but each carries an energy that has remained constant in the body of my work: to uncover hidden sensations and emotional experiences through a variety of kinds of storytelling; to question common social assumptions and explore uncommon insights; and to discover unusual and provocative connections among people, situations and ideas.

Since a film takes one year to several to complete, my ideas about form and concept are under continual personal scrutiny and change. I am drawn to the beauty of authentic and mysterious imagery, restrained performance, and richly textured aural environments.

Over the years my work changes considerably because I am a mother. It goes a lot slower, and thus, more strategically. I no longer have vast amounts of time to devote to my creative obsessions, so any gesture I makes becomes as definitive and bold as I am capable of. The sense of time passing (and with children around it is so intensified) makes me want to work harder than ever with the energy I have available. Or else the moment, each one seeming to burn brilliant, will be lost forever.

I came of age artistically during the late 70s and 80s when the excitement and exchange of energies was unparalleled in this relatively new field called the media arts. I was heavily influenced by a generation before me who pioneered new ways to approach film, video, installation and its ongoing dialogue with all the other arts. The air was filled with an overwhelming passion for cinema, in all its seemingly limitless forms - rediscovering American classical movies, finding new films from abroad, rethinking documentary and learning the language of experimental film and video.

My work comes out of this era which opened up our imaginations to the range of possibilities that moving image media could offer. I would locate my work as coming out of a specific milieu: that of the non profit American media arts movement which gave artists access to technology and tools and a budding infrastructure of alternative exhibition and distribution. Also, other artists and producers, writers, curators, educators, etc. in the independent media field challenged us to explore the politics of culture and media, include issues of identity in our work, and make activist work in the public interest.

Categories were flexible and intersecting, and I learned to be as comfortable presenting work in an art world context (museums and galleries) as on broadcast television or in a variety of theatrical venues and community settings. Since this context for exhibition was open and fluid, it influenced my exploration of hybrid styles - mixing elements of documentary, narrative and experimental forms to see what would happen, yet still engage and move viewers.

That moment may have passed, but the possibilities that were thrown up in the air still are there being figured out and developed by a lot of us. I can’t forget all that I’ve learned from this crazy passion. While the issues change, the technology is refined and funding is always fragile, I still feel the need to continue working from that powerful impulse and framework - where our media practice can still defy commercialization and present the possibility for individual and collective transformation.