ABOUT ME
As a mature artist, I don't have a traditional fine arts resume. While still attending Cooper Union, I became a successful NYC restaurateur, owned fishing boats and a small farm, and traveled the world. At the age of 40, I returned to my initial passion of fine arts. The art career I pursued has taken many forms, from intimate and timely award-winning documentaries to Virtual Reality and, most recently, projection mapping. Yet, always at the core has been my embrace of that magical space where tech and art come together in the pursuit of new forms of storytelling.
In the 1990's, I adopted the exciting new prosumer camera format to capture deeply intimate post-verité video diaries during the AIDS pandemic. My first documentary, Sandra's Web: a Mother's Diary, premiered on HBO and received a major review in the New York Times. Followed by The Andre Show which was broadcast on PBS and featured at international festivals and galleries. In 1999 I was awarded a Masters in Journalism from the Kiplinger Fellowship at Ohio State University. I used traditional broadcast quality gear but shattered the investigative stories I was telling into a multi-subjective approach breaking documentary norms. This allowed me to capture the birth of Antifa and, as importantly, the young people openly embracing the violence of the extreme right. Invisible Revolution screened at the Sundance Film Festival and Museum of Modern Art, among many other international venues and received major press. 71 West Broadway: Ground Zero, NY begins in front of my home 2 blocks north of the World Trade Center on the morning of 9/11 shortly after I stood on the street watching the first plane disappear into the tower. Screenings include the 2002 Library of Congress 9/11 Commemoration, Walker Art Museum, The Warhol Museum, The Kitchen among others and broadcast on the Sundance Channel and PBS. From 2008 to 2020, I was an Associate Professor at Montclair State University where I helped develop the School of Communication & Media and specialized in teaching Documentary and Transmedia. Throughout that time my work continued to evolve along with the technology. WhatKilledKevin, (an interactive web documentary) builds on my earlier use of multi-subjectivity and garnered major press including the Washington Post, Psychology Today and Huffington Post. In 2014, I received a Joint Proclamation from the NJ State Senate and Assembly and City of Newark for educational conferences developed by the National Workplace Bullying Coalition (NWBC) while I was founding President. The creation of NWBC was a direct result of my work on WhatKilledKevin.com In 2015, the passing of my 102-year-old Mom prompted me to look at my family history. This opened a new form of storytelling and became the core and structure for Memory Rooms, and a new technology to embrace - Virtual Reality. I could now go from immersing viewers in a person’s life or situation using a 2D Screen format to stories that take place within physically immersive environments. Memory Rooms, a VR documentary, premiered at the FIVAC experimental video festival in Camaguey, Cuba. Not far from where my father was born. Just prior to the Pandemic, my husband and I moved to the vital and supportive artist community in Hudson, NY. During lockdown, I re-envisioned a series of Farrell's paintings and drawings entitled Russell's Yard as a VR experience. This let users drift through Farrell's memories as they explore the magical and playful stories he and his childhood friends created in response to the world around them while growing up in the Atomic Age. Russell's Yard was exhibited at LABspace in Hillsdale, NY July 2022 Upstate Art Weekend Group Show. VR is an exciting way to tell a story but it’s a complicated platform for people to drop into. They have to put on a headset properly, learn to use hand controls & then navigate around within an imaginary world. I now turned to Augmented Reality by way of Projection Mapping which puts site visitors into an immersive world immediately. A space where time, media and architecture meet. Shaky's Meadow incorporates artwork by Mount Tremper artist David Pollack in a site specific video projection mapping installation exhibited at the Lockwood Gallery in upstate NY in 2022 and reviewed by Jen Dragon, D’ART International, May 2022. Shaky's Meadow was recently expanded for the 2025 Spring Show at The Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, SUNY New Paltz (NY).
​
Together, my immersive installations have evolved from poetic observation to personal metaphor and, most recently, to fully narrative storytelling—demonstrating my sustained engagement with non-traditional tools, site responsiveness, and ethical, AI-assisted media. In Shaky's Meadow, large-scale video, AI enhancements and Pollack's artwork, are poetically projected onto three small birdhouses placing the visitor in a virtual meadow. A simple narrative anchors the piece in time — before, during, and after a storm. Self-Storage (2024), a solo walk-in installation, transformed the TSL Gallery (Hudson, NY) into a storage unit of layered memory archives. Clips from my documentary video diaries merge with autobiographical paintings by my husband and AI-enhanced animations. Images are projected onto walls, precariously piled packing boxes and are embedded on monitors inside dollhouses, to create intimate yet abstract universal narratives about lived experience. Reviewed by Art Spiel 2024. RAINDROP: Andre’s Secret Project, at the Wassaic Project 2025/2026 Winter Show, represents a pivotal shift toward fully narrative, immersive environments. AI animations and enhancements animate lyrical and symbolic narrative frames, and most poignantly, generate the voice of an eleven-year-old boy — my adopted son Andre — so that his own poem, written shortly before his death from AIDS, can speak and be heard within the installation. This use of AI enables an irrecoverable voice to re-emerge, turning technology into a locus of remembrance, agency, and ethical encounter. Visitors may enter at any point while the narrative unfolds. Reviewed David Ebony of Upstate Diary 2025.
​
And now, so many years away from the early days of turning drab restaurant rooms into exciting places where customers can step away from their everyday life, I continue to build worlds for others to experience.
​​​​​​​​​​​