Show Identity

In the entertainment industry, a Show Identity typically refers to branding for episodic content, including variations of visual motifs that repeat in viewers' lives. This Show Identity suggests “chosen family” as pathways for resilience in the margins. Sharing the video creates further visibility for PAIN (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), an activist group founded by Nan Goldin.

My journey as a gender-nonconforming artist working in film began when, in high school, I discovered that still cameras also take video. Taking other people’s pictures assuages the twinge of sentimentality and also wordlessly signals one’s preference for observation. Recording motion pictures also starts a parallel timeline of post-production experimentation, and I grew accustomed to crafting intricate digital objects out of transient moments.

While attending New York University, I wrote a story about sexual violence in my Iowa hometown. Its complexities inspired my honing of a conceptual cinema aesthetic that also tells a story. The process culminated in a thesis production featuring professional actors and local nonprofessional talent. The work predicted the #MeToo sea change and was awarded several grants but ignored by the festival circuit.

When I was hired on Laura Poitras’ Astro Noise and Risk (featuring Julian Assange), my diverse work-for-hire portfolio had prepared me to contribute to her updates to Warhol’s postmodern deconstruction of art, advertising, and celebrity. After Donald Trump was elected President, I began an investigation into the hospitality at the Bellevue Psychiatric Ward, where I watched the inauguration from the common room and tried to distinguish between paranoid delusions and the actual psychic toll of the surveillance state and post-truth politics.

Gay chat apps then became a site of intergenerational community and multidisciplinary research as I became interested in Friends, Relationships, Networking, and Right Now. I formed (SIC) LLC, cast Thomas Jay Ryan, and premiered my first feature on the LGBTQ festival circuit, where it received a jury award. Afterward, I became involved in an activist campaign directed at the Whitney Museum of American Art. I edited Triple Chaser, a film by the research collective Forensic Architecture, critiquing philanthropy to the museum from weapons manufacturing profits. As protest, the film was withdrawn from the 2019 Whitney biennial, and Warren B. Kanders resigned from the Board of Trustees.

By that time, Martin H. Krieger had hired me to edit a book of his social-science-informed photography, and we had become partners. In 2020, I returned to my debut feature, releasing it with First Run Features as the triptych Dedalus. The film was praised for its singular vision and patient observation of behavior. Critic A.S. Hamrah called it "a really original and hard-hitting but merciful movie." Hamrah and I later collaborated on Jenny Perlin's Bunker, which opened Doc Fortnight at MoMA in 2021, about American men living in decommissioned military bunkers and nuclear missile silos, and the companies that build and sell them.

On 30 August 2021, the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan and I flew to Iowa to begin shooting my second feature. 6655 Mount Vernon Road takes its title from the address of a defunct television company office near where I grew up. In 2022, I distributed it in territories excluding the U.S. and proposed – to the Board of Governors at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences – an American submission to Best International Feature at the 95th Oscars. In a press release to over 12,000 publicity contacts, I announced the proposal and explained that submitting the film would allow Academy members to view its entirety on the Academy Screening Room member site and to choose whether to nominate. I included a twenty-four second excerpt, in which the audience at a high school football game is asked to “please remember the valiant men and women who have served our country in defense of our liberties and values.” Members of the motion picture industry and representatives from other arts organizations signed letters in support of the initiative.

We succeeded in getting All the Beauty and the Bloodshed nominated for Best Documentary. Resisting traditional modes of working allows me to subvert myths about the lay person, upward mobility, and the American dream. Utilizing narrative, documentary, and experimental techniques, I address themes such as consent, the loneliness of tokenism, loss, and existential complexities of victimhood and social justice. These documented memories evoke our shared humanity in a world increasingly fractured along ideological lines and thwarted by technology’s progress.