Producer - Director - Writing Mentor
When a grieving teen uses her dead brother's headphones to escape into a perfect fantasy world, she must choose between comforting delusion and facing reality with her fractured family.
Kids In The Spotlight is a nonprofit organization that provides the opportunity for youth impacted by the foster care system to learn to write, cast, and star in their own short films while working alongside industry professionals through their flagship program, Script-to-Screen.
A trauma-informed modality, Script-to-Screen offers youth career exploration into the entertainment industry while folding therapeutic experiences into the program’s vocational training, using the power of storytelling to help their youth face their pain and find their power.
Screened at Pan African Film Festival
White Noise began as a deeply personal exploration of how we cope with unbearable loss. Having experienced the disorienting pull of dissociation myself, I wanted to create a film that made the invisible visible — showing how grief can fracture our relationship with reality and how the mind creates elaborate escapes when the world becomes too much to bear.
The red headphones became our central metaphor: a tangible object that transforms subjective experience into something audiences could see and feel. When she wears them, we enter her idealized world — warm, safe, perfect. When she removes them, we're thrust back into the harsh fluorescent reality of teenage life complicated by loss. This visual language allowed us to explore the seductive nature of escapism without judgment, understanding that sometimes we need these refuges before we're ready to heal.
What fascinated me most was examining how grief isolates us, even from those experiencing the same loss. Each family member in White Noise has retreated into their own bubble of pain, missing each other even while living under the same roof. The film suggests that healing isn't about individual strength or "moving on," but about finding our way back to each other — sharing the weight instead of carrying it alone.
As a filmmaker who works across multiple creative disciplines, I'm drawn to stories that require us to build entire emotional worlds. Every element, from production design to sound design, had to serve the film's central question: How do we honor what we've lost while remaining present for what remains?
White Noise is ultimately about the courage required to set down our most precious escapes and show up for the messy, imperfect, beautiful work of being alive with other people.
