My portfolio &other
Students, faculty reflect on DEI ban after a semester of enforcements
Final news feature for Reporting: Words class under the supervision of Professor Savage, supplemented by data visualization graphics. Six months since enforcement of the laws began, student and professional employees at UT shared their experience adjusting to the new rules.
A study of Olympic Forest, WA
Field notes from Seattle to Port Angeles, March 2024. Madison Falls glowed with an iridescent blend of two transparencies: light and water. It stood on the edge of an old-growth forest characterized by 200-year-old trees, with the upper river originating in Mount Olympus.
Flying men of Mexico City
Short thoughts and moments caught on a film camera from spring 2024 in Mexico City. Streets named after assassinated Aztec emperors inspire a sense of doom for a once-collapsed society, and the exposed electrical wires hanging from the buildings seem to agree.
A report on student housing affordability
Video produced and edited in collaboration with Austin Community College’s Student Government Association, detailing the anticipated meeting with Chancellor Richard Rhodes to present the Housing Affordability Proposal.
Mourning Flora
Earlier this semester, Austinites celebrated the life, and mourned the removal, of Flo- a tree that once dangled over Barton Springs Pool. The Daily Texan spoke with community members to learn more. Produced by Lucia Llano.
The future of fashion is trash
Video for my Digital Storytelling class, fall 2023. Students at the University of Texas at Austin sift through mounds of clothing items previously left in trash bags. The Campus Environmental Center encourages others to reuse and thrift new clothes at their Trash2Treasure event.
Cheap philosophy, rubber shoes in Buenos Aires
Notes, recollections, and film from the city of “Fair Winds” and the capital of Argentina, Buenos Aires. Charly García’s “Filosofía Barata y Zapatos de Goma” captured my image of the city: impulsive, sporadic, and spellbinding like a muse of its own heartbreak.
Nuevo Leon thermals
Observations of Santiago, Nuevo León, read through my notes app and seen through film. Monterrey breathes through a chest of mountains connected by a network of wires on every street.
A father’s flan recipe
It started at a tailgate; two friends, buzzed under the Texan heat dome, and a conversation about starting a business together. It would take almost a decade for the aromas of their Napoletano flan and pork-fat tortillas to imbue local markets with the familiar-to-many scent of home cooked food, their business realized.
Film: a month in London
A transcribed journal of my London film and notes, taken and written by me. I remember the trip starting something like this: The Smiths blasting through my headphone speakers, looking past the window panes in an Austin bus, fall of 2021.
The Putumayo way
A kaleidoscope of beads lights Juan Riaño’s table. He lays out his handcrafts one by one: the tricolor macaw birds, the threaded bracelets and chest laces, the traditional wooden masks. He leaves a piece of Putumayo, Colombia, outside a busy West Campus intersection.
Pomegranate, fig, and almond trees
My Uzbek roots gravitate to land. The living clay, the quilted kurpacha, the plowed soil. The love for earth disciplined and arranged my people’s way of life. It took and it gave, nourished and destroyed.
Outside our time
“The hallmark of the modern mind is that it loves to wander from its subject.” Donna Tartt hypothesized this in her novel about academics who, forming an orthodoxy outside their Northeastern liberal arts school, attempt to transcend the triviality of their lives. This fatal flaw of “wandering,” the human desire to play hide and seek with our own ideas, is not one of fiction.
Hell of a play
French chanson plays inside a Presbyterian church as the guests take their time to fill up one of the rooms. They are here to see Austin City Theatre’s production of “No Exit” by Jean-Paul Sartre, an existential play first performed in 1944 Paris and originally translated by Paul Bowles.
To weave a rock: Daniel Johnston’s exhibition review
Truth, deep-seated within each one of us, finds its own way of expressing itself. For the late Austin artist and musician Daniel Johnston, it manifested through personified ideas in his imaginary – and perhaps very real – scattered world.
Volunteer to Vogue: backstage at NYFW
During fashion week, the backstage crew is like a hive mind. From makeup stands to model dressers, seating charts to Run of Show boards, all hands are on deck.
West Campus open journals
On a West Campus lamp post facing 24th St. hangs a scan of a diary entry. Some bypassers walk past it, not noticing it above another poster looking for a band drummer. But others stop to read it, and the anonymous writer is heard.