Working across narrative cinema, immersive media, and critical video essays, I make character-centered work about people who are often overlooked, unheard, or misread: a person worn down by bureaucracy, grief and financial strain, a painter measuring herself against an impossible standard, a photographer losing their sight. Empathy is the foundation, the process, and the intended result of my practice.

Cinema became meaningful to me when I first recognized how a simple display of moving images was able to impact me so profoundly. That encounter has continued to shape my artistic philosophy. I understand filmmaking as a formal and ethical practice of attention: through performance, framing, duration, sound, and narrative structure, I strive to create spaces in which audiences can confront the distance between them and the characters – before the eventual realization of the shortness of that distance.

My most recent narrative short, Pay the Difference, currently in post-production, develops this inquiry through an intimate story about economic insecurity and bureaucracy. The film traces how administrative and financial pressures can reshape relationships, constrain choices, and alter an individual’s sense of dignity. Rather than presenting bureaucracy as an abstract institution or offering a simple social diagnosis, I use character-centered fiction to explore its intimate consequences and the human cost it incurs. The project continues my commitment to narrative filmmaking grounded in social reality and moral ambiguity.

In Waiting Rooms, a critical virtual-reality project currently under development, I extend the same questions from my narrative short to a more interactive form. The work places participants within the bureaucratic aftermath of death, where formal requirements, endless waiting, and procedural demands interrupt the ability to grieve. By limiting the participant’s agency, the project makes bureaucratic power experiential rather than merely representational: the user must face delay, uncertainty, and constraint. The project utilizes and explores the potential and the limits of immersion within virtual reality. Both the narrative short and VR project are a part of my MFA thesis work.

Across these projects, I am interested in how media forms can make systems of power felt at the scale of ordinary human experience. Whether through the intimacy of narrative fiction or the constrained agency of immersive media, I use form not simply to represent social structures but to examine how they shape perception and agency at the individual level.

I also worked on another short film project, Worthy (2025), for one of my courses. Worthy is a character study of a painting student who resolves to either become a great painter in a single day or never paint again. The film unfolds as a wordless montage scored to Vivaldi’s “Winter,” while putting us in the character’s perspective as she destroys her past work and pushes herself beyond her limits. The film was selected for exhibition at the University Film & Video Association Conference in 2026.

My film, Color of Sunset (2022), was also designed as a character study exploring the life of a photographer gradually losing their vision. The film was rooted in my interest in exploring complex characters that often go unnoticed or are misunderstood. The film was well-received at numerous international film festivals including screenings in Malaysia, Russia, Sweden and Bangladesh. The film was exhibited at the Pakistan National Council of Arts in Islamabad. Color of Sunset also won Best Debut Director and Best Student Short Film awards at the Nitiin International Film Festival in Malaysia.

As a filmmaker-scholar, I intend to sustain a practice in which creative production and research continually inform one another. My long-term goal is to develop films and media projects that are both emotionally resonant and critically engaged in the contemporary media landscape. I aim to continue my contributions to textual and audiovisual scholarship on cinematic realism, hybrid forms, and spectatorship. I also plan to collaborate with students and colleagues across film production, media studies, interactive design, and the humanities because an integrated approach treats creative work as research and brings theory, history, and media-making into active conversation.