Oh Whale
When news anchor Paul Linnman arrived in Florence, OR on November 12th, 1970, he had no idea that the story he was about to tell would forever define his career. Following a small Oregon town, an exploding whale, and the man who made the story famous, Oh Whale is about how we don't get to choose our fate, only what we make of it.
Directed by Winslow Crane-Murdoch, 2025 — Documentary Short
Produced by Luke Terrell, Cecilia Brown
Winner of Documentary Short Jury Award, New Hampshire Film Festival (Academy Award–qualifying)
Winner of Short Documentary Jury Award, Montclair Film Festival
Official Selection, SCAD Savannah Film Festival (2025)
Strong Grandma
95-year-old Catherine Kuehn is a world-record-winning powerlifter. As she prepares for her final competition, she reflects on the love and loss that brought her to this moment.
Directed by Winslow Crane-Murdoch & Cecilia Brown, 2023 — Documentary Short
Production Company: Sideyard Studios
Premiered at DC Shorts Film Festival
Winner of Audience Award, Denver Film Women + Film Festival
Winner of Special Jury Award at OLY House (Paris 2024 Olympic cultural film program)
Released by The New Yorker
Art21 Extended Play: Howardena Pindell Inner Circle
For nearly six decades, artist Howardena Pindell has expanded the language of abstraction while confronting a racist and misogynistic culture. “When you work with abstraction you’re working with your own intuitive feelings about space, color, line, shape,” she says. “Its purpose is almost a way of opening up our thought process because you’re reading someone else’s language and interpreting it through your own.”
Fascinated by circles and numbers, Pindell has developed a visual language that bridges personal and universal experience through painting and works on paper. In this Extended Play film, she reflects on formative childhood memories, experiences of systemic prejudice, and the enduring joy she finds in being an artist.
Directed by César Martínez Barba, 2024 - Documentary Short
Produced by Art21
Art21 Extended Play:Amy Sillman To Abstract
Marking, whittling, struggling, scumbling, contradicting, and abstracting, artist Amy Sillman wrestles with the history and materiality of painting, continually reinvigorating the medium through new references and perspectives.
In her Brooklyn studio, she works improvisationally, using nontraditional and ad-hoc tools to scrape, wipe, and wash away layers of paint in an ongoing process of editing and revision.
Directed by Ian Forster, 2024 - Documentary Short
Produced by Art21
You Are the Subject: Richard Serra at Glenstone
You Are the Subject: Richard Serra at Glenstone documents the installation of a major new sculpture by American artist Richard Serra at the Glenstone Museum in Maryland, exploring the relationship between nature, art, and humanity.
Composed for the film’s final scene, the music features chamber strings and classical guitar.
The film premiered on March 17 at Le FIFA in Montreal and is available to stream on Designboom.
Directed by Rafael Salazar Moreno, 2023 - Documentary Short
Co-directed and Produced by Ava Wiland
Produced by Rava Films
Art21 Extended Play: What the Camera Cannot See
I’ve worked closely with Art21, scoring several seasons of their award-winning series Art in the Twenty-First Century. This segment is from Richard Mosse: What the Camera Cannot See, part of their digital series Extended Play. It combines footage from Mosse’s gallery exhibition with behind-the-scenes material from the making of the work.
The Weekly
The Weekly was a half-hour documentary series produced by the NYTimes for Hulu and FX. Each episode followed a different breaking news story and the Times journalists who covered it.
Working collaboratively with the NYTimes, production company LeftRight, and the design studio Afternoon Inc., I developed The Weekly’s sound design, theme song, and created episodic music.
To promote the program, I expanded this body of work into a sound toolkit that could be used for trailers and other promotional videos.
Show Open - Creative Direction, Design, Animation, Edit: Afternoon Inc.
Trailer and promotional spots - Creative Direction, Design, Edit: FX, Ultrabland and Afternoon Inc.
Client - NYTimes, FX
Art21: Art in the Twenty First Century
Art21 produces award-winning documentary films about the world’s most groundbreaking contemporary artists. In its signature style, Art21 captures the artist’s voice without narration through its flagship PBS-broadcast series, Art in the Twenty-First Century, and digital short film series’ Extended Play and New York Close Up. I worked with the producer and directors of seasons 8-10, scoring all episodes as well as writing music for the trailers and promotional material.
Deidre and Laney Rob A Train
With their mother in jail and bills piling up, ambitious small-town teens Deidra and Laney plot a series of train robberies to keep themselves afloat.
Directed by Sydney Freeland, 2017 — Feature
Co-scored with Mark Orton
Premiered at the Sundance Film Festival (2017), nominated for the Audience Award (Best of Next!), and released on Netflix
Harvest
Harvest captures one week in the life of a woman named Jenni, tracing the quiet patterns that shape her daily existence. As we get to know her, we also come to understand the extent to which her seemingly ordinary life is of interest to people she has never met.
Directed by Kevin Byrnes, 2016 — Documentary Short
Premiered at Aspen ShortsFest (2017)
Of Minor Prophets
In rural Midwest farmland, a lonely bachelor farmer befriends a sex worker whose intentions are not what they appear. Desire, deceit, and doubt converge as both are forced to confront how far they are willing to go to get what they want.
Directed by Joe Hubers, 2014 — Feature
Premiered at the Landlocked Film Festival (2014), where it won Best Narrative Feature.
Winner of the World Cinema Screenwriting Award at the 2015 Amsterdam International Film Festival.
Heart of Wilderness
Travis and his wife Aimee are struggling to stay afloat financially and keep their marriage intact. After becoming entangled in a drug deal that goes wrong, Travis convinces Aimee to join him on a canoe trip in northern Minnesota. As they travel through icy waters, he reveals they cannot return home and that he intends for them and their six-year-old daughter to start a new life elsewhere. Along the journey, Aimee’s own secrets begin to surface.
Directed by Towle Neu, 2015 — Feature
Premiered at the River Run International Film Festival (2015)
Winner of the Grand Jury Prize, Duluth Film Festival (2015)
Best of Fest, Minneapolis–St. Paul International Film Festival (2015)
The Birch Grove
Caught between love and death, two brothers wrestle with their past in a dance toward reconciliation. A poetic film about the power of family ties, inspired by the novella by Polish author Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz.
Directed by Gabrielle Lansner, 2015 — Short
Winner of Best Original Score, Santa Barbara International Fine Arts Film Festival (2021)
Grand Jury Prize and Best Experimental Film, Underexposed Film Festival (2015)
Screened internationally, including Cinedans (Amsterdam), Cannes Short Film Corner, and the San Francisco Dance Film Festival
Drunktown's Finest
Set on a Navajo reservation, three young people—a soon-to-be father struggling to build a better life, an adopted daughter seeking to reconnect with her roots, and a transgender woman pursuing a modeling career—navigate identity, responsibility, and the desire to shape their own futures.
Directed by Sydney Freeland, 2014 — Feature
Co-scored with Mark Orton
Executive produced by Robert Redford
Premiered at the Sundance Film Festival (2014), nominated for the Audience Award (Best of Next!)
Acquired by Sundance Channel
Winner of the Grand Jury Award (Outstanding American Narrative Feature) and Audience Award (Outstanding First Narrative Feature), Outfest (2014)
The Joneses
The Joneses follows Jheri Jones, a lively 74-year-old transgender divorcee living in Mississippi’s Bible Belt. Reconciled with her family after years of estrangement, and now living with two of her sons, she embarks on a new journey to share her identity with her grandchildren and confront tensions from the past.
Directed by Moby Longinotto, 2016 — Documentary
Premiered at the San Francisco International Film Festival (2016)
Nominated for the Golden Gate Award for Best Documentary Feature
The Stronger
The Stronger evokes the interior conflicts of two women grappling with love, betrayal, and shame, and is inspired by August Strindberg’s play of the same name.
An emotional and psychological journey unfolds as we are drawn into the interior worlds of two women in love with the same man. Without dialogue, the story is told through subtle, emotionally charged choreography juxtaposed with realistic vignettes.
Directed by Gabrielle Lansner, 2012 — Short
Broadcast on SVT, Sweden
Nominated for Best Experimental Film, Female Eye Film Festival, Toronto, Canada
Best Artistic Directors Award, Lady Filmmakers Festival, Los Angeles, USA
Award of Distinction, Open Stage Film Festival, Tarnów, Poland
W.L. Dow: Architect
W.L. Dow: Architect follows the work of Wallace Dow, a prairie architect who arrived in Dakota Territory in 1880 and helped shape towns across the region through his distinctive designs.
Known as the “Builder of the Prairie,” his use of Sioux quartzite and architectural style left a lasting mark on South Dakota’s built environment.
Directed by Brad Dumke, 2013 — Documentary
Premiered on PBS