In the middle of the nineteenth century, an extravagant Frenchman arrived in New York with a gold-tipped baton and a sense of theater that the concert stage had never seen. His name was Louis-Antoine Jullien, and long before Liberace—or anyone who understood that art and spectacle could share the same stage—there was Jullien.

The following unsigned article appeared in The Choir Leader in December 1898—the very month of George Frederick Bristow’s death. The author could not have known that the composer would pass away only weeks later, and thus the piece stands midway between tribute and obituary. Written in the past tense yet with the expectation of further work to come, it praises Bristow’s integrity, idealism, and devotion to American musical life while lamenting the nation’s failure to recogniz

Charlottesville, a city that once aspired to be a center of learning and culture, now bears the shame of this desecration.

As a documentary filmmaker, I was moved by Lankes’s vision and by his friendship with Robert Frost and Sherwood Anderson. With J.J. Lankes: Yankee Printmaker in Virginia, I aimed to explore how his art and his dialogue with Frost, Anderson and others framed an American understanding of work, place, and purpose.

In 2004 I had the privilege of producing a film on Jesús Ramón Vera, a celebrated poet, writer, and devoted comparsero from Salta, Argentina. Vera’s life and work offer a fascinating journey across the cultural frontier of Northwest Argentina, blending high literature with the deep, collective traditions of the Andean highlands.

The Jefferson Hotel opened in 1895, a creation of Lewis Ginter and the New York firm Carrère & Hastings. In 1901, a devastating fire consumed much of the building, and the iconic marble statue of Thomas Jefferson, sculpted by Edward Valentine, was heroically rescued—wrapped in mattresses and carried to safety by hotel staff.

The Future of Documentary Filmmaking is here, and the opportunity is immense. We can speak across borders, build communities of curiosity, and reimagine how memory and truth circulate. But the work demands a routine, a sustainable practice, and a kind of faith—the same faith composers once needed when creating music that might never be performed.

While Americans like George Bristow struggled to define a voice independent from Europe, composers in Italy, Germany, and the newly forming states of Central and Eastern Europe faced parallel challenges. The age of revolutions and unifications — from 1848 to the 1870s — was also the age of cultural nation-building. Music, literature, and painting became instruments of self-definition.

New York City, January 29, 2026 --- I’m honored to be joining an extraordinary group of scholars and musicians at the Forging an American Identity conference this January in New York City. The conference opens Wednesday, January 28, at Geffen Hall, Sidewalk Studio, Lincoln Center, and my participation will take place the following day, Thursday, January 29, at the Elebash Recital Hall at the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

Across painting, music, and the decorative arts, the exotic functioned as a field of projection—a way for Western culture to measure itself against the imagined other. Lévy’s brush, Tiffany’s glass, Bridgetower’s bow: each transformed foreignness into beauty, light, and sound that spoke as much about the Western imagination as about the East it sought to evoke.

As of today, the prestigious European network ARTE is broadcasting a short exposé on the extraordinary work of the Piccirilli Brothers in America. The piece, produced in New York by Jennifer and Edward Luby, was inspired by the documentary "The Piccirilli Factor" and John Freeman Gill’s feature article in The New York Times.

What I'm offering starts with six Italian brothers who carved the American Dream into stone—the seated Lincoln, the NYPL lions, hundreds of monuments that became part of our collective visual vocabulary. The Piccirilli Factor has found its audience at The Met and in academic circles, but can it translate across Europe and the Middle East? That's what I'm here to test.

The distinction—between the beautiful and the sublime—was crucial to nineteenth-century aesthetics, and it became the fault line in the cultural dialogue between America and Europe. Europe had the beautiful: cultivated landscapes, historic cities, art that had been refined over centuries.

Colonel James A. Gray, the founder of the World Monuments Fund. She described him as a man who solved problems with quiet boldness—the kind who didn't just raise money but took action. In 1965, he founded what became WMF after pursuing ideas that seemed audacious at the time, like stabilizing the Leaning Tower of Pisa. In 1968, he arranged to bring an Easter Island moai to New York's Seagram Building to remind the world what was at stake—heritage, memory, humanity itself.

Fourteen years ago, I made Rita Dove: An American Poet, a biographical film that captured something essential about one of America's most important voices. You can watch the documentary below. Now, as Rita and I prepare to embark on a new cinematic journey exploring her epic poem Sonata Mulattica, I find myself revisiting that first collaboration—not out of nostalgia, but to understand who we were then, what we captured, and how far we've traveled since.

A photograph that stops someone mid-scroll, that makes them wonder about the person in the frame, that sparks a question or a conversation—that photograph has done something powerful.