I have several years of audio editing, narration, and voice acting experience under my belt. The following projects are samples of such experience. I am proficient with Reaper, Hindenburg, Audacity, GarageBand, and have some experience with Pro Tools.
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Piece developed for for my Podcasting, Radio Reporting, and Storytelling class with Dan Bobkoff at New York University School of Continuing Studies in the Fall of 2021. Prompt: how has the pandemic changed you?
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Piece developed in my Audio Production and Sound Design class with Louis Mitchell at the New York University School of Continuing Studies in the Fall of 2021.
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Piece developed in my Creating a Narrative Podcast class with Eric Molinsky at the New York University School of Continuing Studies in the Fall of 2021.
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Produced and edited while attending the American University of Paris as a Master’s student in Diplomacy and International Law. I was brought onto the podcast after the first episode, when production demands were getting more intensive.
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Highlights and additional materials from various voiceover and narration projects.
Audio Production and Narration Samples
Sample One
Piece developed for for my Podcasting, Radio Reporting, and Storytelling class with Dan Bobkoff at New York University School of Continuing Studies in the Fall of 2021. Prompt: how has the pandemic changed you?
Running used to give me panic attacks. I played soccer competitively growing up, and while I loved to play, I hated running. Every Thursday, we had “Fitness Day” with a capital F, which meant interval sprints, five mile jogs, and ten minute planks. I was a good player. But I was the slowest on the team, and my teammates were not kind to me about that fact. So, after playing for 12 years, I gave up my favorite sport in the world.
However, that’s not the end of the story. And it’s not the first time I’ve told it. This is a story I developed in a five minute audio piece I created for a podcast storytelling class I took last Fall. We were tasked with creating a piece that combined interview content, narration, music, and sound design. The prompt was this: tell the story of your pandemic experience. For me, my pandemic experience was defined by one major life change. I started running. On my own. For fun. Without anybody yelling at me to do it. I knew that that was the story of my lockdown experience. So, that is how I ended up throwing on my favorite Peloton Outdoor Running instructor (my girl Becs!), duct taping my iPhone to my chest, and recording every thought that crossed my mind for the next 45 minutes as I pounded the pavement of Bushwick.
Content creation and exercise aren’t often seen as inextricably linked, but that has always been the case for me. After I stopped playing soccer, I found dance. Dance quickly became my favorite activity in the world, not because I was good at it (I couldn’t even touch my toes), but because suddenly, I never wanted to stop moving my body. I didn’t have panic attacks on Thursdays anymore. I went on to attend Playwright’s Horizons Studio at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where movement and dance was built into the curriculum. I worked with Dan Safer, Mike Mikos, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Ani Taj, Hope Davis, and a myriad of other prominent dancers devising choreographed content for a wide variety of performances. I got in the best shape of my life at theater school.
But then I graduated, and I’ve lived in a tiny shoebox of an apartment ever since. The pandemic hit, and every good habit I’d built over the years started falling to the wayside one by one. I couldn’t dance – I had no space. I lost so much of the fitness I’d taken for granted. Until, one day, I drove to visit my parents, where I hopped on their Peloton for the first time. Now, I’ll be honest – I didn’t enjoy the bike. Like almost everyone I know trying the bike for the first time, I nearly threw up. But, I adored Anna Greenberg’s 20 minute beginner yoga that I tacked onto my workout when I had to recover from the trauma of Robin’s tabata class. I went back to NY, downloaded the app, and started doing every class possible that didn’t require the hardware. Which included some outdoor walking classes. Which became outdoor walk + runs. Which, eventually, became outdoor runs. And I now saw Robin as one of my new parasocial best friends, completely forgiving her for her tabata transgressions.
The piece I developed using the audio from my run was the most emotional piece I’ve developed. Listening to myself, I realized how much I gained from running – confidence, patience, better habits. Most importantly, running taught me that it was OK to start small and work my way up. Doing something was better than nothing, even if that something was a five minute jog with half an hour of walking. Running taught me that thinking about my body mindfully was more important than the end product of what my body or workout looked like.
Not A Runner
Sample Two
Piece developed in my Audio Production and Sound Design class with Louis Mitchell at the New York University School of Continuing Studies in the Fall of 2021.
A Spooky Podcast
When I tell people I love horror, I often get the response, “Oh, cool, me too!” or “I’m such a scaredy-cat - I can’t watch horror at all!” If it’s the former, we go on to discuss the box office hit of the moment. For the latter, we’ll discuss whatever horror movie the poor soul watched through their fingers on a bad first date.
However, within a few minutes, the person I’m talking to often pipes in with, “oh, you mean you really love horror.” Because, for me, horror is not just a genre of B-list movies or a fun tradition on Halloween. For me, it is the lens in which I view all content I consume.
My theory on why I love horror so much is that, as an incredibly sheltered child, I grew to crave knowledge about the darker, hidden parts of the world. That, or the stubborn pride I’ve had since childhood made it impossible for me to admit I was scared. Horror is the genre I always return to – my first love, my steady constant, my rag-time ghoul. If I find myself in a rut and don’t know what to watch, read, or listen to, I pick a random horror story and dig in. Even if it doesn’t end up being my favorite, I know I will still enjoy myself, because it is horror.
At the end of the day, I don’t actually know why I love horror as much as I do. But knowing would almost defeat the point of the genre. Intellectually, horror represents what Eugene Thacker describes as "The World Without Us.” In his book, In the Dust of This Planet, Thacker states that horror is “not simply about fear, but instead about the enigmatic thought of the unknown.” Horror is an attempt to make sense of that which does not make sense. In a way, it is defined by the human tendency to draw connections and patterns out of random occurrences. The human brain seeks to explain the world in which it exists, even if that world often terrifies us.
But speaking about horror intellectually can only get you so far. Horror is horror because it can’t be intellectualized – at least not entirely. Artists can infuse intellectual concepts, social justice commentary, and complex artistic themes into their horror pieces, but those elements are highlighted by an overarching feature of the genre: there are things we cannot ever know, there are things we cannot ever understand, and we live at the whim of things that we cannot ever control. When speaking about a piece of art in the horror genre, how can you ever pin down its exact meaning when the fear derives from a lack of meaning? In trying to explain the terrifying, unknowable parts of the world to us, our brains will grasp for realities we know, and they often fall short. This leaves you with that creeping dread on the back of your neck, the rush of adrenaline as you run up the stairs after dark, the glimpse of a deceased loved one just outside your vision…
Fear is a personal, indefinable, autonomic response to things our brains just can’t process. Horror, as a genre, takes advantage of this – unconventional visual effects, audio design, and narrative structures will frequently represent the mental state of a character, the audience, a creature, a villain, or the creator themselves. Because of this, horror often breaks the boundaries of the medium in which the artist is operating. Some of the most groundbreaking developments in film got their origins from D-List horror movie passion projects that didn’t have to uphold whatever standards were popular in Hollywood at the time. Horror stories featured strong female characters, LGBTQ+ representation, and divisive social themes far earlier than mainstream media.
Beyond film, audio storytelling has always been a home to the most creative, spookiest, and weirdest of horror creators. I started listening to horror audio dramas with The Black Tapes in 2016, and I can confidently say that, if you mention a horror audio drama to me, it is likely that I have at least given it a try. I listen to any new horror audio drama I find, and so, when presented with the opportunity in my audio production class, I decided to create this fictional horror piece, a trailer of a longer series hopefully still to come. I learned a lot about how difficult it is to produce terrifying audio, and it only made my respect for the genre grow.
“The production on this piece is fantastic. Everything is working, you showed good examples of using microphones in different ways…You have demonstrated that you have an understanding of those techniques and how to achieve different outcomes. The enthusiasm and energy that you bring to audio production is infectious and I can see that you are ready to produce projects independently but will also achieve considerable results in working with a team.”
Sample Three
Piece developed in my Creating a Narrative Podcast class with Eric Molinsky at the New York University School of Continuing Studies in the Fall of 2021.
Rear Window-ing
The people across the street look like our friends, Ian and Niko. We have no idea if it’s actually them. We don’t really want to know it’s NOT them. We are existing in a space of infinite possibility where it could be them, and it isn’t yet not them, but it also isn’t them in the way we once knew them. Schrödinger’s Ian and Niko. My significant other, actor Harrison K Moore, and I created this piece to explore what it means to be a stranger and the ways in which we relate to the strangers we encounter every day. Our intention was to “investigate” whether the strangers were indeed Niko and Ian using only the minutiae we’d picked up from day-to-day life and social media.
But, it’s been a year since we made this piece, and we have very much confirmed that it was indeed Ian and Niko across the street from us.
Harrison and I developed this piece together after I spent half an hour explaining to him the different reasons I thought that it might or might not be Ian and Niko across the street from us, including groundbreaking observations like “it sorta looks like them” and “this photo they posted on Instagram kinda has the street view from their window and it kinda looks like our street.” We loved the casual, unconventional title name, partially because it sounds half-part sinister and half-part friendly puppy running towards a fellow canine on the street. We chose to have a conversation with our roommate, who now goes by Beckett, about their relationship to strangers as an avid online gamer.
This might be my favorite audio piece that I’ve made, because it reflects the kind of art I’ve always tried to make and hope to continue to make in the future.
Sample Four – L’Apres Cours Podcast
Produced and edited while attending the American University of Paris as a Master’s student in Diplomacy and International Law. I was also responsible for designing marketing materials for social media.
L’Apres Cours Podcast
L’Apres Cours Podcast aimed to break down topics in international affairs in an easily digestible manner. The name, meaning After Class in French, is intended to reflect the nature of the discussion – we reached out to professionals in our university network to go deeper on topics that we were discussing in class. We found that the podcast deepened the discussions we had with our peers during class and helped us gain better, more varied perspectives on complex political and social movements.
On the highlighted episode here, hosts Bileh and Stuart spoke to the Senior Foreign Policy Advisor to the President of the Kurdistan region, Mr. Falah Mustafa Bakir. This episode covers statehood, human rights, and the position of Kurdistan in the Middle East. I created the promotional materials (see images) and edited and mixed the audio.
Sample Five
Highlights and additional materials from various voiceover and narration projects.
Voice Acting
Additional Voice Acting Materials: