NEW YORK

has been my home since 2004. My first job was in city government, at the Department of Cultural Affairs, which sent me to parts of the city that many native New Yorkers never see, from the Bronx County Historical Society to the Staten Island Zoo. 

After urban planning school, I briefly worked in an architecture firm before I started working at The Architectural League of New York as the founding editor of Urban Omnibus, an online publication dedicated to identifying good ideas for the future of cities, tried and tested in New York. This work also took me all over the city, meeting and profiling community gardeners, elected officials, architects, and activists. Here’s one of my favorite pieces from that time, a letter from me and my co-editor, Varick Shute, in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy. 

I also got to make several short videos, on topics ranging from technology to housing. The best video I made during this time was for The Architectural League’s exhibition, New New York 2001-2010: The City We Imagined / The City We Made, which offered audiences a rare opportunity to take stock of the range of design and planning activity that  reshaped New York City between 2001 and 2010. For that exhibition, I made Archipelago, which explores a day in the life of five New York neighborhoods: Hunts Point, Jamaica, Mariner’s Harbor, Downtown Brooklyn, and Chelsea.