I’m really proud of a fund that I initiated for student government to start buying artwork from students and keeping it in perpetuity. Holding it as an archive in a collection. It’s an idea I had a couple of years ago and I couldn’t figure out why we weren’t doing it already, given all the artists here. I was never in a position to do anything until this year. I decided I would try to get it to pass. If in 10 years I can come back here and take a look at what’s accumulated, I will be happy. I hope it lasts a decade and even longer. We’re figuring out storage at the moment. It will be run by the student art gallery, which is finally opening as a full-time service next year. We’re hiring a curator now.

IMMERSIVE FILMMAKING
Purchase taught me to be an artist, and I’ve always been able to make any kind of film I wanted. It is one the few major film schools where everyone makes a film (actually, three) and everyone picks up a camera as freshmen. Bravely immersive. The students are trusted to follow their own artistic paths. I know everyone in my program, and I’m on a first name basis with all of my teachers. All of my favorite things at Purchase are student-owned and operated. There is a sense of being part of something valuable and important here. Being in a conservatory has been guiding me toward my career since I enrolled.

ALL ABOUT THE PROCESS
I personally have made 18-19 films, something like that, half of them I like, half I would put away. The film that I made last year, my junior film, was a really instructive experience. I had started out making a conventional documentary that, in itself, was a departure for me because I mostly make “place” films, self-portraits that would be called experimental documentaries. Place films, films about places, very observational. I will sit in a place for an hour or two and record whatever I find interesting and piece it together to make an evocative portrait of place.
My junior film started as a traditional interview documentary. I made it in California in my hometown area. When I got back to New York, though, I realized that I had wasted a month of my life because I didn’t get to talk to the people I really wanted. They shut me out and I had to work my way around it. I ended up breaking the film down and totally reconstructing it from other incidental stuff I had shot from something else. It really showed me how resourceful I had become and my ability to work artistically with limited resources. I had to throw away 13 hours of video from the California shoot. Then, during the editing process, from a much smaller amount of material, I was able to make this movie about the same subject. It was more interesting, more powerful, better at getting across the political point I was trying to make. And it was the result of an hour or two of footage I had shot for fun.

CONSTANT SUPPORT
I have to give props to Greg Taylor, Acting Interim Dean of Theatre Arts and Film Conservatory. Greg is the main Cinema Studies teacher to the Film department. He’s sort of like the academic side of film production. He’s been helpful. He’s brilliant and a great teacher. He always makes you want to impress him, that kind of teacher. Makes me go out and do things I wouldn’t normally do. Motivation. Even when I was considering running for president, he had just become interim dean. He stepped up and did it and our situations were similar with my student government president role. While I have talked to him about films I’ve made and he has been a good advisor, he has also just been there as a person and friend. As I said before, I am on a first-name basis with all my peers and professors. This, in and of itself, says quite a bit about this place.