Here's a glimpse into a project I worked on with Preethi Balakrishnan.  We call it Off Course: A Creative Exploration of Cartography, Cuisine and Narrative. Basically, it's a series of 13 maps with an underlying theme of food that push the boundaries of what a map can be. Each one tells a story, and there's also a fictional editor character with a story of his own.

While seeking inspiration for conferences our editor character might attend, I stumbled across a workshop on Mapping and Emotion put on by the International Cartographic Conference. We applied and actually ended up going to present our fake anthology to a room full of real mapmakers (they were into it). 

 You can see the full project here.

THE ANATOMY OF LONELINESS: What we think a frozen dinner would look like if that frozen dinner were an island.

THE ORIGINAL FAMOUS ABSOLUTE BEST RAY'S PIZZA: In the 80's dozens of independent pizza shops called Ray's Pizza or Best Original Ray's Pizza or Famous Original Ray's Pizza popped up. We read some articles and went through some old phone books: here's the story of the original Original Ray's Pizza.

AN AMERICAN KITCHEN CIRCA 2016: Satirical map that asks in 2116 what will they think of the food trends of today? Will their trends be any better?

A Light in the Window:

This is a horror play with shadows I conceptualized, adapted and directed. I adapted three of my favorite horror stories, "Specialty of the House" "The Yellow Wallpaper" & "It Had to Be Murder" (the short story "Rear Window" was based on) to be told as first person accounts.  Behind the storytellers was a large shadow screen I built that we used in slightly different ways for each story. For instance, for the last story, "It Had To Be Murder" we used the screen as the window. At the climax all the lights went out and when they came back on the man who'd only been viewed in shadow was strangling our storyteller (as seen below).   

Photo Credit:  Austin Dowling        Poster Credit: Michelle Maudet

"Holidays I've Had" is a card catalog I created for an art exhibit titled "Young Bloods". Here's a picture of the project and a couple of my favorite vignettes. The idea was that you could just read a couple or stand there and read them all and come away with a different impression.

Spec Packaging Idea/Product idea

Used books come with a second the story, the story of where they've been and the places they'll go.

What if at a used bookstore like The Strand people selling books were asked to anonymously share those second stories with those buying them?

Art Director: Preethi Balakrishnan