Hi, I’m Amanda

I'm a storyteller of the documentary and non-fiction variety, and everything I do runs on one idea: create the conditions where people can actually be themselves, and better content follows.

Over fifteen years I've held almost every job in the News & Doc production pipeline — NBC Page to Supervising Producer at Showtime — and directed more films, specials, and segments than I can count. A lot of that work happened in hard rooms, with people navigating grief, conflict, illness, some of the toughest moments of their lives. Thousands of conversations in, I can tell you the best "sound" never came from the perfect question. It came from whether I'd made the space comfy enough for people to stop monitoring their answers and just be themselves.

That's hard to do in journalism. Being "on the record" is intimidating, and there's rarely the time or room to do it any other way. It's one of the noblest professions, and still, inherently a bit extractive. I loved the work and derived a lot of my purpose from it, but journalistic ethics — valuable and necessary as they are — fell short of how I wanted to treat people. So I rebuilt my storytelling practice around what can be given instead of what's taken. The approach eventually became Documentary Intelligence™: an ethical practice focusing on generative interviews (with or without a camera) to surface real stories about real people with the potential for real impact.

The funny thing is, it's actually the best of both worlds. The ethical practice doesn’t just ensure a kinder process, it actually generates better stories. The best part? Research backs this up: When people feel really listened to, they get less defensive, clearer on what they actually think, and better able to hold complexity — their own and other people's.

That's my work in a nutshell — listening, teaching, and directing, with or without a camera, to create workplaces, films, and conversations that help people feel seen.