is a writer, photographer, documentary filmmaker, and Professor of Cinema Studies and English at Oberlin College. After earning master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Chicago, he worked in public television in Washington, DC, where he directed Catholic University’s Program in Media Studies and George Washington University’s Institute for Documentary Filmmaking. 

His film work for public television has received an Emmy Award; his photography received National Geographic’s 2008 World in Focus Grand Prize and has appeared in venues such as National Geographic Traveler and The New York Times; and he has written about media, culture, and politics for the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, Wired, the Nation, the Economist, the American Prospect, Ms. Magazine, Cineaste, and National Geographic Traveler, among others, and has worked as a correspondent in Spain for both TIME and for the Christian Science Monitor.

With filmmaker and frequent collaborator Rian Brown he created BLUE DESERT — Towards Antarctica, a multi-channel video installation shot during a three-week expedition to Antarctica that premiered at Boston’s Laconia Gallery and has been exhibited in different forms across the United States at museums and festivals including the Newseum in Washington, DC, the Anchorage Museum of Art, the Myers School of Art in Akron, and the Cleveland Museum of Art Cinematheque.

With grants from the Mellon Foundation and the Ford Foundation’s JustFilms Initiative, he and Brown directed and produced The Foreigner’s Home (theforeignershome.com), a feature-length documentary on the intellectual and artistic vision of Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison that premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam and has screened across the U.S. and in Europe at festivals including the Miami Film Festival, the Santa Fe Independent Film Festival, and the Ashland Independent Film Festival, and at museums including the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the British Film Institute, the Wexner Center for the Arts, the Uffizi Gallery, the National Gallery of Art, the Hammer Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum.

He recently completed this film, which premiered at the 2019 Santa Cruz Film Festival, was selected for the Hot Docs Doc Shop and the Visions du Réel Media Library, and was awarded the Grand Jury Prize at the 2019 Lonely Seal International Film, Screenwriting, and Music Festival. It will be showcased at this year’s Cannes Festival online and at next year’s festival in France. 

With Brown, he founded and directs the Apollo Outreach Initiative, a media education and community outreach program housed in Oberlin’s historic Apollo Theatre.