Lost in the Funhouse at Filmmaker magazine

The Summer 2016 issue of Filmmaker magazine just hit a newsstand near you! Check out my article about Santa Fe art collective Meow Wolf’s House of Eternal Return, an (George R.R. Martin funded) immersive experience – dubbed “Pee-wee’s Playhouse on steroids” by NPR.

25 New Faces of Independent Film: Livia Ungur and Sherng-Lee Huang

Romania in the 1980s was a time defined by communism, austerity and the authoritarian rule of Nicolae Ceaușescu — and also capitalism, Texas excess and the fictional oil tycoon J.R. Ewing. Artistic and life partners Livia Ungur and Sherng-Lee Huang explore this dichotomy in their unbelievable (in all senses of the word) feature debut Hotel Dallas, a hybrid doc that’s been blowing minds on the festival circuit ever since its Berlinale 2016 premiere.

To read the rest of my piece visit Filmmaker magazine.

Shakespeare in an Xbox?: A Chat with EK Theater’s Eddie Kim

I first encountered the work of Eddie Kim and his EK Theater — comprised of students from the Pierrepont School in Westport, CT — over half a decade ago at The Brick Theater in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Until then I’d never heard of, much less conceptualized, what Kim has christened Machinima Theater (or “video game puppetry,” as he now prefers to call it). The director-gamer’s innovative idea places classic texts within a live video game setting in an effort to actively engage with today’s audiences, both young and old. I recently spoke with Kim about the effect of gaming technology on traditional theater, his upcoming summer camp workshop “Grimm’s Fairy Tales: Retold in Video Games” at The Brick (open to middle school students possessing laptops and Minecraft accounts), and how he consistently mashes up the seemingly unmixable (yes, even “Grand Theft Ovid” was a critical hit).

To read my interview visit Global Comment.