I make pictures move. For more than twenty years in New York, that’s meant cutting, directing, designing titles, and running creative teams — often all in the same week.

Today I’m Creative Director at Bader Media, leading creative strategy for branded content and broadcast news distribution — most recently directing Built to Last: Toyota’s Mobility Journey. Before that I ran post-production at PeopleTV (Entertainment Weekly: The Show, Binge Worthy) and spent five years as Creative Director at Digital Broadcasting Group on campaigns for Coke, Ford, HP, Mars, Unilever, and the U.S. Air Force. Along the way, I’ve cut for Comedy Central, MTV, VH1, truTV, Universal Kids, and Above Average.

My own films have traveled too. The Third Wave, a feature documentary I edited, screened at Cannes and Tribeca and won Best Documentary in Monaco. Keep Going Joon, a comedy I wrote and directed, won the Jury Award at the Art of Brooklyn Film Festival. Most recently, I edited Ian Phillips’s The Book of Ahmad, which won Best Documentary at the Bedford Documentary Film Festival in the UK.

During the pandemic, with sirens echoing through the empty streets of Brooklyn, I made myself a promise: I’d finally do something I’d always believed I could but never tried — sing and play the guitar. So I practiced. I wrote songs. And somewhere in that process I solved a problem that had held me back for years: how to put myself into a film I began in 2005 about my mom, who died of cancer when I was nine.

That film is Hummingbird — a feature documentary with eight original songs I’ve written, plus music by my dad, Chris Daniels, and his commune band, Magic Music. It’s built from my mom’s art, her photography, and the journals she kept through her illness.