Hi. I'm Briana, writer & director & editor & photographer.
I’ve been midwifing stories into the world for fifteen years.
My work bloomed out of meandering across four continents with muddy boots, interviewing hundreds of people in their ordinary moments, and digging my hands into every stage of written/photo/film projects.
These days you can find me back home in LA producing All the Greatest Gays and photographing community goodness. For 2026, I’m putting a camera (lovingly) on the scrappy, whole-hearted folks usually behind the camera and filling up notebooks with my own stories.
If we’re working together, I’ll likely hear & hold some tender moments of yours. It’s only fair, then, that you get a glimpse into some of mine:
As a teen, I traveled to a place that had barely opened to international tourists: Burma.
Monks in red patiently answered my questions, oxcart was a viable mode of transportation, and strangers invited me into their homes everywhere I walked. I made dumb mistakes with my camera, like waltzing into a monastery courtyard and taking photos without talking to anyone first. (I was still graciously invited inside.)
I came home, and no one I knew had been to Burma themselves or knew much about it. I loved telling them about my adventures but felt the responsibility immediately that comes with sharing stories about a place, especially when the people of that place aren’t able to speak freely themselves.
This is when I started thinking about the power of who gets to tell stories.
In my last semester of college, two things happened at once:
I got my hands on a new camera, freshly capable of recording video as well as stills, and I had a chance run-in with the person who’d become my mentor—an exiled Ethiopian journalist. Four weeks later, I was on a plane to Ethiopia with the idea to film a documentary about something beyond the usual narratives of African war/poverty/famine. I had no further details to the plan or any experience filming.
I spent my first 24 hours in Addis Ababa questioning my life choices when, over a batch of emotional support French fries, I had another chance encounter: Ethiopia’s first 3D animation team sat at the table next to me. That afternoon I followed them through their editing on hand-me-down computers from the UN, their two-day long renders disappearing every time the power went out. I joined them for the first showing of their kids’ series in the hills outside the city. (So much green! Who knew!?)
They showed me the real meaning of scrappy, and I cultivated some of my own scrappiness when I returned home with a hard drive of footage I had to learn how to edit.
Brief interlude for the season of life I spent schlepping my babies to my favorite places. They taught me patience (22 hours on planes with an exuberant toddler; entire afternoons inspecting sidewalk rocks) and the importance of stashing snacks on my person at all time.
Cameras are a part of our family culture, and we’re twelve years deep into my favorite work, our family year videos:
In 2017, I applied for a social entrepreneur fellowship in New Zealand…and didn’t get in.
The rejection stung, but the heads of the program invited me to New Zealand to produce an interview series with the first cohort of impact fellows. The energy of these folks gathered in one place was more electric than anything I’ve ever experienced, to the point that we were all up until the early hours of the morning, scheming and collaborating and talking big ideas.
It was an honor—truly—that my name was even considered among these rocket scientists, human rights workers, and mega world-changers.
10/10, would recommend leaving behind your toddlers for three weeks, ugly-crying as you board the plane for another hemisphere, and facing your rejection head-on. I returned home with a clear example of how bearing witness can be change-making, too.
I’ve spent the last decade mostly closer to home, exploring the American west with my family in a camper truck named Fordo Baggins, molding the stories of teen cancer survivors into both a book series and a documentary, and producing more big-hearted words & pictures for people and orgs making the world more delightful.
