In 2013, you graduated from Duke Divinity. You also began work on Santuario, a documentary short about Juana Luz Tobar Ortega, a Guatemalan woman who was provided sanctuary in a church in Greensboro after being told she needed to leave the country—despite being a resident for 24 years. You mentioned this film was pivotal in your career. Can you say more about why?

I do think Santuario was pivotal. It was a special, timely project that was an opportunity brought to me by another Duke graduate and my co-director, Christine Delp. As we built a team of like-minded creators to work on a long-term project, we had no idea how many years we would spend distributing the film creatively through an award-winning festival circuit, broadcast, and community screening tour. I had some important mentorship and artist development opportunities throughout those years from the IF/Then Shorts program, Women in Film LA, Working Films, and New Orleans Film Society. Around this time I began working full time as the lead filmmaker and producer of my production company, Teacup Productions. We work with independent films, broadcast media, journalism outlets, and for hire on pieces with like-minded clients. Starting Teacup was key for me in choosing filmmaking as my primary vocation, and I know working on Santuario was a part of making that choice to pursue film solely.

Your credits as a director, producer, and cinematographer now includes nine films and several other shorts and projects. Are there other projects that were as pivotal as Santuario in your progression and growth as a storyteller and filmmaker?

I’ll focus on a few recent projects. I was recently awarded a fellowship through the NEH and ITVS to develop my first feature documentary as a director, Untitled Catholic Women Documentary, about the changing role of women in the Catholic Church. Our project is in production, has been filming with women ministers on multiple continents, and is supported by incredible producers (including Duke grads  Delp and Andrea Patiño Contreras). This film would not exist without the efforts of people connected to Duke Divinity, especially alumna Casey Stanton and her organization Discerning Deacons. This work has been life-altering, allowing us to film in the Vatican, the U.N., and the Amazonian territories of Brazil. It’s very exciting to be able to visually represent women’s spiritual lives and Catholic practices, as well as looking at some of the deep history of women’s work in the church. 

During Black History Month 2025, I released a new short, A House for My Mother, about Dr. Benjamin Nero, also the co-creator, on opening night for the Oxford Film Festival in Mississippi. Dr. Nero has an incredible story of surviving the Jim Crow South to rise to great heights as one of the first Black dentists in the country, and the film won the juried prize for best documentary short. Another recent film, The Last Partera, has been really impactful. A project about a 100-year-old midwife in Costa Rica, this film taught me so much about nonfiction storytelling and production. It was really rewarding to premiere the film at Duke’s own Full Frame Festival in April 2025.

We’d be remiss not to touch on theology more directly. You mentioned in our time together that theology doesn’t necessarily take center stage in your films and the stories you tell, but theology does, you said, help you think about why you do what you do. Could you say a bit more about that? 

I see the worlds of action, faith, and theology as being inextricably tied together, not to mention in our relationships to one another and the wider community. The films I’m working on hopefully will tie people to one another—and that stems from a foundation of trust. Andrei Tarkovsky’s work has shaped how I think about trust between filmmaker and audience. He spoke often about the importance of bringing complexity to your work as a creator and as nuance as a form of trust between creator and audience. In an interview he said, “The only way a creative idea can reach the consciousness of viewers is by way of the total faith of the creator in the viewer. It must be a sort of discussion between them on an equal level. There is no other way.” I think this trust and bond is essential in movements and in making art. 

I think after so much striving to make films that stir people to action, I’ve actually come to a place of wanting more out of my own projects so that artistic inspiration and the truth of our human experience can be interwoven. I hope for the ability to trust audiences with stories that reveal tensions between who we are and what the world needs. And all of that involves trust. In terms of sanctuary and immigrant communities, the Moral Mondays movement, the Catholic Women’s movements, and others, I’m grateful to have the trust on both sides where I can receive these stories and also translate them to others, and I try to cast community practices and social ethics as our meeting ground, and to show a complex picture of creating community-led change. And all of this stems from my theological vision and training.

By way of close, do you have a few words for prospective students who might be interested in the program—would you recommend it and why?

I often describe my degree at Duke as primarily a history and philosophy degree engaged in the intersection of ethics and art. I would recommend primarily that people with a passion for their art grow in the technical skills necessary to make a career in it. But Duke Divinity School has always been about shaping leaders who rise to meet the intersecting challenges of their time. Right now, there are many burdens on our shared freedom of expression and an inundation of content at the same time. There are more hurdles than ever to overcome to reach an audience as an artist of any kind, especially filmmakers. Hopefully artists who want to pursue this degree as I did can use that space to shape their voice to meet the world with the art it needs.