I spent my childhood shuttling 2 hours between families in San Francisco and Seaside, California. At around the time NWA was popping and my elementary school classmates were asking me what the abbreviation stood for, everyone in my family had a jheri curl. 

My mom was an educator. She helped build daycare centers, preschool and African-centered Saturday programs. She and her friends would plan Juneteenth celebrations and MLK Day parades in our living room. We were interviewed every year for the holidays by local papers so that they’d have at least one Kwanzaa story. My mom taught me that the best education is the one you give yourself and enabled me to choose where I went to school, including Piney Woods School, a boarding school in the South and Northfield Mount Hermon for a post-grad year in New England.

I was the kid who knocked on doors to get Diane Feinstein elected. I started petitions on campus to prevent classmates from being kicked out. I created a Black Out day on my college campus to protest the racial profiling of Black people in and around our university. I co-founded Youth4Reparations to get young people in the conversation and to encourage the elders to consider the ways our perspective could shape the global reparations movement. 

I am most successful in achieving my goals when I do so in community with built in accountability, so I co-founded a sisterhood of over 175 women in 7 countries that challenges us to change lifestyle habits in 40 and 90-day sprints.  When I wanted to increase my financial literacy and build wealth for my family, I co-created Tulsa100 Families with a group of friends and co-conspirators. When I wanted to honor the artists, activists, and entrepreneurs that I was inspired by who all lived or created in Brooklyn, I joined DOPE SWAN and together we produced A Great Day in Brooklyn, photographed by Jamel Shabazz. When I realized that we were approaching the 20th anniversary of Do the Right Thing, I reached out to our community and together we produced a 3-day, 5-event tribute - Where’s Mars?: Brooklyn Honors Spike Lee.

Committed to enriching and enabling the best capabilities in others, my best friend and I created what at the time was the sole creative consulting company in New York City that focused on implementing ground-breaking ways to grow start-ups, emerging leaders, and small institutions - positioning the underdogs. I wanted to put a life coach in schools and joined what was at one time the most innovative education non-profit in America, and created a new role for public schools - The Dream Director. After a taste of corporate culture, I stepped into the world of Human Resources and began challenging the nature of American workplaces, confronting the dangers of looking at employees as resources and the implications of capitalism on workers’ rights.

While on maternity leave with my second child, my parents died in a car accident. I have learned to channel strong emotions into creative endeavors, and the lessons from their deaths have been used to build an end-of-life literacy program and campaign. I had been taking filmmaking classes and going to film festivals when I went to the American Black Film Festival a month after my parents’ passing. During the HBO shorts program I heard Sam Eliad and Joekenneth Museau (Days After Your Departure) talk about having both recently lost their mothers. That night, I went back to my hotel room and wrote the synopsis of my first short film - L-O-V-E. Shortly thereafter, I joined the multimedia experience company The Gates Preserve to help build their media arm.

These days you can find me collaborating with Pink Gators Productions, supporting first-time documentary filmmakers and tv writers. I believe that moving images have the power to bring about revolutions - large and small.