Many of these years were spent reading scripts and looking at movies professionally. I enjoyed a long history with the Sundance Film Festival, acting as Associate Short Film Programmer and Festival Senior Consultant to the Documentary Film Program. I also served as Associate Director of the Documentary Film Program of the Sundance Institute, which administers the Sundance Documentary Fund and the Sundance Documentary Labs. I have acted as Director of Programming, Artistic Director and 'Gestor Artistico' for the Morelia International Film Festival in Morelia, Mexico. I am also the former Director of Programming of Outfest, the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. At Outfest, I also oversaw a year-round, repertory screening series and a Screenwriting Competition and Lab.

In my film festival travels, I have attended the Cannes, Toronto and Berlin International Festivals, as well as Tribeca, South by Southwest, AFI Fest, the Los Angeles Film Festival, and of course, Sundance. At Cannes, I have worked closely with the organizers of the International Critics Week section, with whom the Morelia Festival shares an ongoing partnership. Documentary-specific festivals I’ve attended include the International Documentary Festival of Amsterdam (IDFA), HotDocs, Full Frame, Silverdocs, Cinema Verite (Tehran), DocAviv (Tel Aviv), BritDoc (Oxford), Lisbon Docs (Portugal), Dokfestival-Leipzig (Germany) and CPH:DOX (Copenhagen) Other wonderful festivals and exhibitions I’ve taken part in include Cinematexas (Austin), The Artivist Film Festival (Los Angeles), NewFest (New York), the San Francisco International Lesbian & Gay Film Festival, the Pan-African Film and Art Festival (Los Angeles), MIX/NY, the Los Angeles Latino Film Festival, The Los Angeles Asian Film Festival, the New York Underground Film Festival, The Worldwide Short Film Festival (Toronto), the LA Shorts Film Festival, Vidarte (Mexico City), the Guadalajara Film Festival, Geografias Suaves (Oaxaca), the Huesca Film Festival (Spain), the International Documentary Association’s “Docu-Week,” and the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar.

At many of the above festivals, I served as a panelist, panel moderator, or film competition jury member. I’ve also attended the international film markets of Cannes, Berlin and Los Angeles, as well as New York’s IFP Market. Additionally, I’ve sat at documentary pitching panels at the NALIP (National Association of Latino Independent Producers) Producers Academy, the BritDoc Pitching Forum, and the European Documentary Network’s Financing and Co-Production Forum in Lisbon, and training and pitching programs of the Discovery Campus Masterschool at Leipzig and in Timisoara, Romania. I have served as a tutor in the year-round Discovery Campus program.

Before my work in festivals and the independent film sphere, I served as Story Editor at Interscope Communications, Inc., in Los Angeles, where I read hundreds of screenplays and manuscripts submitted to the company, wrote story pitches for major studio meetings, oversaw a team of freelance readers, and scouted writing and directing talent from local screenings and theatrical presentations

Somewhere along the way I completed one unproduced screenplay, worked on sets and in production offices for various film and television programs, and did archival research in 1930s-era production records for the television documentary, THE MAKING OF A LEGEND: GONE WITH THE WIND.

Before all this, I was a student of film, and completed two degrees: one in Film Production (Bachelor of Science, Ithaca College, 1986) and another in Film History, Theory and Criticism (Master of Arts, University of Texas at Austin, 1989.) Previously, I’d had to satisfy myself with a mound of movie star biographies, a pre-collegiate “Intro to Film” course at a small-town branch of the University of New Mexico, and a subscription to American Film. (The magazine is now defunct. It was quite a life-line at the time.) I am currently at work on a manuscript about the meaning of cinema culture, tentatively titled WHY FILM?

None of this has cluttered one basic fact: I love movies, and I love helping filmmakers get closer to their goals.