ABOUT
Hi, I'm Haley.
Making art is how I work through things; filmmaking became my chosen medium after a childhood fascination with art and cameras and scribbling stories in notebooks before I could spell the words correctly.
My films are focused on female stories, I especially like to explore female friendships, in all their fearless, flawed, fulfilling multitudes. How we hurt and get hurt, but also how we can change and grow. I’m interested in queer womanhood, facing intersections between patriarchy and homophobia. I’m still trying to figure out what it means to grow up, my past and future selves haunting each other. I try to do this through touches of magical realism, asking questions of things that I don’t quite know the answers to yet. My films tend to be horribly personal, putting them out into the world feels like offering my heart up on a platter, hoping to be understood. It’s the most gratifying thing when people can relate to what I’ve created. Blame it on my age, but I still like to look at things through a hopeful lens. I like to believe we can do better.
My photography stems from a different desire. Want to know a secret? (Although I suppose it’s not really a secret if I’m publishing it on a public website) I’m terrified of forgetting. Be it the big things – the sweeping of a cliffside or a valley or the outstretching of the ocean – or the small things – the red backpack my grandma wears when we travel or the way the sunlight falls through the window. The big sweeping sunsets and the way my friends look when they’re laughing. The good things and the bad things, and everything in between. I want to remember it all. I feel better with a camera in my hand, like an extension of my body, but I’m learning to balance documenting the moment and living in the moment (it’s a work in progress).
Beyond my art, I like to watch sunsets, by screaming my favorite songs as I drive along the California coast or walking west through Boston as if I can catch the pink of the sky in my hands. I’m trying to return to the vicious reader I was as a kid, reading books as if the words were oxygen to live. When I’m home I try to spend as much time as I can in the sea, the horizon of the Pacific is full of possibilities. I scrawl potential lines on sticky notes above my desk and have a fascination with old analog cameras and I collect words like currency, hoping something, something will come of it.
Haley is a visual artist and writer, born and raised in California’s South Bay and currently going to school in Boston at Emerson College. As a visual artist, she creates short films, as well as working in both digital and film photography. As a writer, she writes screenplays for her short films, as well as longer projects to improve her writing skills. Her end goal is to become a writer-director of feature films and limited series TV, focusing on female-centric stories.