I am a passionate educator with 10+ years of teaching experience at NYU, Pratt Institute, Columbia University and the City University of New York. I believe that the best learning happens through fearless experimentation, brilliant failures and the courage to try again. My curriculum offers a blend of technical skills, theory, history and best practices in the fields of visual journalism, motion graphics, interaction design, animation and immersive storytelling.

These are some of my teaching engagements over the years.

Visual Journalism

Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), NYU Tisch School of the Arts

Fall 2023 will be the third iteration of this course, designed to provide an overview of visual storytelling in the newsroom. In this class, we explore a variety of narrative formats and design principles, learn about reporting techniques for visual stories, touch on the best practices and ethics of journalism and get our hands dirty with collaborative weekly assignments.

This year I will be co-teaching with the brilliant Or Fleisher. Together we will experiment with focusing the class on spatial storytelling, using three.js as the underlying technology.

Augmented Reality in Journalism Workshop

Brown Institute for Media Innovation, Columbia University

In March 2018, I partnered with Kristen Leach to conduct an all-day, hands-on Augmented Reality workshop for Brown Institute’s Transparency Series, organized by Mark Hansen. Kristen and I were part of The New York Times interdisciplinary team that helped launch AR capabilities on our digital platforms. The paint was still drying on the first immersive story we published for the 2018 Winter Olympics and we were eager to see how this novel format can inspire other creators.

We opened with a conversation about AR’s potential in journalism and shared our experiences prototyping, designing and building our first project. We then divided students into teams and facilitated brainstorming sessions to help generate concepts. To better understand space and scale, students created rapid prototypes using physical props like cardboard, legos and, in one case, their own bodies. Following a technical session on Unity and ARKit, each team made a simple AR experience and presented it to the class.

Team Rhino wanted to create an AR experience based on a trending story about the use of IVF to restore the nearly-extinct White Rhino population. For their physical prototype, the team used their bodies to map out the volume of a White Rhino at true scale.

Team Curiosity created a successful AR experiende using a publicly-available 3D model of the rover. They used legos to physically prototype the interactions.

Motion Design and Infographics

CUNY Graduate School of Journalism

In the Fall of 2016 I co-taught a motion design and infographics course with my New York Times colleague and Director of Immersive Platforms, Graham Roberts. The class introduced journalism students with varying degrees of design and technology proficiency to animation, data visualization and hands-on After Effects skills. Working with such a diverse mix of sensibilities and skillsets was a new and enjoyable challenge. Students researched, designed and built a motion graphics project based on their area of journalistic interest.

One of my favorite projects was developed by Barbara Marcolini, who became my NYT colleague shortly after graduating. She created a 360 video telling the history of Freshkills Park through a combination of contemporary footage and archival photography.

Intro to Motion Graphics with After Effects

Undergraduate Communications Design Department, Pratt Institute

I taught an introductory motion graphics course in ComD’s undergraduate department for ten semesters from Fall 2010 to Spring 2015.

Below are a few still frames from the Music in Motion project my students work on in the first few weeks of every semester. The goal of the assignment is to use abstract imagery to create a visual dance, in the spirit of early motion graphics pioneers like John Whitney, Len Lye, Maurice Binder and Saul Bass. It is an excellent exercise for honing essential motion concepts like speed, rhythm and composition, as well as practicing basic After Effects keyframing skills.

My favorite student project of all time was created as part of this assignment by ComD aluma, Marian Obando, who built an early motion graphics phonotrope by printing out frames animated in After Effects, arranging them on a record player and submitting a recorded video as her final piece.