Tabanok is a visual ethnographic short film addressing processes of social and ecological change in the Sibundoy Valley, an Indigenous territory in southwest Colombia. As an exercise in filmwork as fieldwork, Tabanok represents an attempt to interpret several local manifestations of liminality—including change and continuity in Indigenous sociocultural traditions (particularly musical production), processes of ecological change inflicted by settler colonial land use systems, and forms of resistance enacted by the Indigenous communities—through the camera lens and editing suite as method and medium rather than the research paper. In so doing, the ethnographer also becomes a liminal actor, walking the line between academically established conventions of ethnographic knowledge production, resulting in more immediate if less academically valorized forms of seeing, listening, and knowing. Beyond its ethnographic particulars, Tabanok thus asks how liminality might be treated in an audioivisual ethnographic medium, and whether experiences of liminality might be better communicated filmically rather than textually.

There are moments, fleeting and seemingly random, when one might experience a present reflexivity, a sense that ‘in this very moment life is changing forever.’ Countless people in western North Carolina encountered this sensation the morning of September 27, 2025, as Hurricane Helene ravaged the turf we call home. (Re)Building, an ethnographic short film shot in Bloomington, IN documents how a midwestern collective—an instrument builder, a cultural diplomacy organization, and a graduate student—worked together to respond to this natural disaster from a distance, in craft and in friendship.

(Re)Building is an eco-organological film combining influences from ecomusicology, environmental studies, and the ‘slow cinema’ style of Anna Grimshaw, which emphasizes narrative development from long, slow takes and limited dialogue. Following Dylan Robinson’s work on refusals in Hungry Listening (2020), this project attempts to limit the perpetuation of trauma porn in visual scholarship on environmental and climate crises. This ethical mandate is supported by the manipulation of opacity, palimpsestic imagery (Huyssen 2003; Daughtry 2013), and extensive use of montage. With these devices, the film allows for coexistent timelines and emotions—the then and now, past and present, despair and hope, destruction and construction—bound together by a singular grounding location: luthier Tyler White’s workshop.

(Re)Building tells the story of Mandolin #50, built by Tyler White, which, through a collaboration with the cultural diplomacy organization The Bluegrass Ambassadors, continues to support disaster relief through the NC Arts Disaster Relief Fund.

How I Hear the Blues is a cinèsensory reflexive autoethnography of how I receive sonic and visual cues expressed through one of the most significant cultural expressions of Black America, which functions as a living archive of history, identity, and resilience: the blues. Rather than interviewing another community member, as a practitioner and folk group member myself, I document my original songs and the social and racial events that inspired them, while giving context to Black life in the tradition of the post-slavery American South. Shot through the lens of a post-civil rights society, How I Hear the Blues: The Oral & Aural Narrative of Black America documents the blues as a way to preserve stories, conserve cultural memory, and pass down the lived experiences of Black Americans across generations.

Blues lyrics often tell personal stories of hardship, migration, love, loss, protest, and family folk belief. By sharing these experiences, through this visually sonic medium, the short film creates a collective narrative that resonates with the struggles of Black communities across the South and beyond. The intention behind this cinèsensory film is to honor both oral and aural aspects of the presentation.

A study of people and place, Walk Over Here: Walkover Sounds and Stones and the People Who Love It (Part 1), is a nonlinear documentary that considers a slice of the Bloomington, IN music scene and community sprouting out of a local record shop, Walkover Sound and Stones. Guided by the presence of shop owner, Wil Bewley, Walk Over Here places the viewer in the middle of the sonic space of the record shop, effecting a type of “meeting” wherein the musicians, music lovers, and friends who regularly convene inside become less distant–even as no distance is traveled nor meeting initiated by the viewer.

Moving beyond the observational mode to perform an active participation-with, akin to what Luc de Heusch termed the “participatory camera”, Walk Over Here is guided by a logic of conversation, bouncing in and out of time in a topical and rhythmic relation. Rather than defining the record shop with an objective thesis, Walk Over Here evokes the presence of being within the sonic and social space of Walkover Sounds and Stones, allowing the viewer to decide their own relation to the musical community and shop.