Why do you do what you do? Was there a transformative moment that solidified your career choice, your org’s success, or your commitment to storytelling?
I do this work because history has a way of hiding in plain sight, and I’ve built my career on the belief that healing, individually and collectively, starts with knowing. As a public health professional working in health equity every day, I saw firsthand how the gaps in people’s health outcomes are so often rooted in stories nobody ever told them: the Flexner Report and how it shaped access to Black medical schools, the Clark Doll Test, the community erased to build Dulles Airport. These aren’t just historical footnotes. They are the reasons disparities exist today, and most people have never heard of them.
The transformative moment for me wasn’t a single event so much as a recurring one: reading comment after comment from people saying a video explained something about their own life they never had language for. That reaction, somewhere between grief and relief, told me storytelling wasn’t a side project to my public health work. It was the missing translation layer between data and dignity. Numbers can tell you a disparity exists. Story is what makes people care enough to change it. That’s why every piece I create ends the same way: healing starts with knowing.
Tell us about your Telly Award winning piece. What’s the story behind it?
“America Buried a Black Town to Build an Airport” tells the story of Willard, Virginia, a thriving, predominantly Black farming community in Loudoun County settled by formerly enslaved people and their descendants. By the mid-20th century, Willard had homes, farms, a store, a post office, and Shiloh Church at its center, generations of self-sufficiency built by families like the Corums, Baileys, and Johnsons. In 1958, the federal government decided, without public hearings, that Willard would become the site of a second major airport for the nation’s capital. Between 1959 and 1961, officials paid an average of $500 an acre, condemned the land of 87 remaining property owners, and bulldozed more than 300 structures. Shiloh Church itself was uprooted, its congregation and cemetery relocated miles away. On November 17, 1962, President Kennedy dedicated Dulles International Airport on the land where Willard once stood.
What makes this story so haunting is how invisible it remained for decades. Millions of people fly through Dulles every year with no idea a community once stood on that land, farmed it, worshipped on it, and was erased from it almost entirely without a fight they were ever given the chance to win. Researching the piece meant digging through old post office maps, county records, and firsthand accounts from descendants and former residents, people who were children when they watched the government bulldoze the two-story homes their fathers built.
Telling this story mattered to me because Willard isn’t an isolated case. It’s a pattern: infrastructure and progress built, again and again, on land taken from communities with the least power to resist. Winning a Telly Award for this piece was a recognition that audiences are ready to sit with that history, even when it complicates the story they thought they knew about a place as ordinary as an airport terminal.
Can you share a behind the scenes story or fun fact about the making of your piece?
One of the most meaningful parts of making this piece wasn’t in the edit bay; it was standing outside Dulles Airport itself. I made a point of going there before I finished the script, and I took my time. I didn’t just snap a few photos and leave. I stood outside and really let myself take in everything I was seeing: the runways, the traffic, the sheer scale of the place, and tried to hold that against everything I had read about what used to be there.
It’s such a strange thing to stand outside a space built entirely for speed and movement, knowing that decades earlier it was home, farmland, and a church for a community that never got the chance to say goodbye on their own terms. There’s no marker most people would notice, nothing that stops the average traveler in their tracks. But once you know what you’re looking at, you can’t unsee it. I sat with that feeling for a long time before I ever wrote a word of the script.
I think that’s the part people don’t always realize about this kind of storytelling. It’s not just research and interviews and editing. Sometimes it’s just standing somewhere quietly, letting a place tell you what it’s still holding onto, so that when you finally do put words to it, you’re not just reporting facts. You’re carrying something you actually felt.
What are you most proud of about this piece? What is the most memorable response you got from this work?
What I’m most proud of is that this piece didn’t flatten Willard into a footnote. It would have been easy to make a two-minute video that says “a Black town used to be here” and move on. Instead, I wanted people to walk away understanding the scale of what was lost: the homes, the church, the cemetery, the decades of self-sufficiency built by families who had every reason to distrust a system that had already taken so much from them, and still built something whole anyway. I’m proud that the piece treats Willard as a full community with a history, not just a tragic footnote to an airport’s origin story.
The most memorable response I got wasn’t a comment with the most likes or the most shares. It was hearing from people who fly through Dulles regularly, sometimes for work, sometimes just to visit family, who told me they would never look at that airport the same way again. A few said they found themselves standing at their gate thinking about who used to live beneath the runway they’d just landed on. That’s the whole goal of this work. I’m not trying to just inform people. I’m trying to change how they move through the world, even in small, quiet ways, like standing in an airport terminal and finally seeing what’s underneath it.
You won a Telly Award for this piece. Why is recognition important for you, your team or your work?
Recognition like this isn’t about the trophy for me. It’s about validation that this kind of storytelling belongs in the same rooms as the biggest productions in the industry, even though it’s often made with a fraction of the resources and none of the institutional backing that bigger networks or studios have. A lot of this history has been kept out of mainstream attention for decades, sometimes deliberately, so when a piece like this is recognized by an organization like the Telly Awards, it sends a signal that these stories aren’t niche. They’re essential, and they deserve the same level of craft and respect as any other kind of filmmaking.
It also matters for the people whose stories these actually are. Descendants of Willard, and communities like it across the country, have spent generations watching their history get erased, minimized, or footnoted. When a piece honoring that history gets real recognition, it’s a small but meaningful signal that their story mattered enough to tell right, and that the world is paying attention.
And personally, it’s fuel. This work is often slow, solitary, and uncertain: you don’t always know if a story will land the way you hope it will. Recognition like this reminds me that the care and time I put into these pieces isn’t going unnoticed, and it pushes me to keep going after the next story that deserves to be told.
