I'm a documentary filmmaker and Emmy Award-winning producer. When I'm not consulting and directing, you can find me here — teaching curious storytellers how to find, shape, and share stories with both craft and integrity.

Essential Storytelling emerged from 15 years of production practice and is the underlying philosophical framework of what I have come to understand about story and our relationship to it, including what ethical storytelling can do for us and others.

What's "Essential Storytelling" anyway? It's a practice for taking storytelling seriously — as a tool, an ethic, and a way of being — with three interconnected parts.

Personal: Learning to see your own story from new angles, integrate what you've kept separate, and author your life on your own terms.

Relational: Learning to see others with the same complexity you'd insist on for yourself — refusing to reduce people to types or tropes, staying accountable to the person, working with stories and people rather than on them.

Communal: The ripple effect when enough people do the first two. When we move through the world with a storyteller's lens, we stay curious longer, listen like it matters, and make room for people as they actually are.

Part field guide, part confession, Essential Storytelling wasn't something I designed as much as something I finally articulated. Teaching is how it is cohered into a framework. Consider it the base-layer and guiding principles of my work, whether in the classroom, in the field, or with clients.

I don't teach "Essential Storytelling," distinct from documentary work, at least not yet. What I do teach is documentary production and storytelling — classes, workshops, and intensives grounded in this methodology, which prioritizes storytelling craft and relational integrity.