What’s your childhood dream?

My childhood dream, now adult dream, is to experience as many places as I can. As a child I was fascinated with travel in it’s entirety. I love the excitement of taking off and landing in an airplane, the conversations of a road trip and the reward of seeing something spectacular. Although I was born in Illinois, I have spent the greater portion of my life living in Oregon. When I was a child, my parents took me and my brothers to the many magical parts of Oregon and Washington – Multnomah Falls, Mount Saint Helens and the Lava Caves of eastern Oregon just to name a few. The adventure of exploring unfamiliar territory has always been a passion of mine. Later in life, when I was 20, I spent three months living with my brother in Crown Heights, Brooklyn and I took a lot of time exploring the burrows of NYC on my own. For a girl who grew up in the suburbs of Portland, the culture of the Big Apple alone was something I could spend years leaning about. The places I explore can be filled with humans or filled with nature, I don’t care. The journey of finding my own path in an unfamiliar place is a huge accomplishment for me and always leaves me thinking about where I will go next. I guess it’s a never ending dream because I haven’t been everywhere.

What is the most important thing you have done so far?

The most important thing I have been apart of was both an amazing professional and personal experience. In the fall of 2014 the Allen Hall Studios group was given an opportunity to produce multimedia pieces about poverty in Lane County – the project was called Life Below the Line. This gave me a chance to go in to the field and see what I was really made of. My group found our story with Tracy, a homeless woman who is a powerful voice in the Whoville community. For the first time I had to earn the trust of my interviewee because she was hesitant of my intentions. My group met with Tracy and other interviewees multiple times, so we could build a relationship and in turn produce a powerful piece.

What I will always remember is sharing our finished video with the rest of the Allen Hall Studios team, thinking it wasn’t what it had the potential to be yet, and getting an overwhelming response of emotion. What my team had worked on for a little over two months was a success because we took the time to create a meaningful relationship with Tracy. Our project was also a way to spread Tracy’s thoughts and show a side of the homeless community that is often overlooked. I was proud to be apart of a project that had a purpose and wasn’t just another surface scraping, meaningless piece.