I’m making it my mission this year to support fellow female creatives. Erica Hampton is my most recent victim.

Erica is a Michigan native turned Angeleno, who specializes in portrait photography. One of her standout works include the Ypsi Project, where she interviewed and photographed over 200 local residents from Ypsilanti.

Recently, Erica dropped by the studio and took a few photos of me and some members of the team with her vintage 4×5 Kodak camera. Take a minute to check out her photography.

They turned out lovely, Erica. Thank you.

Hey there. It’s been a while. I’ve been neglecting this blog for quite some time. Most of my activity for the past year has been on Twitter, or Tumblr, or Facebook, but I’m making a change. I think it’s time to come back home. This doesn’t mean that I won’t have a presence on all of those other social platforms, it just means I’ll be sharing more of my personal life and original work here.

I’ve also been working full-time, heading up the original video team, at Disney Interactive. I don’t work on the lot, but I visit often. I’ll start sharing some of what I’ve been working on here, as well.

So, hello again. Welcome… and excuse the mess while I move the furniture around.

Tomorrow I’ll be taking a plane ride to Paris to meet up with thirty-nine other young cultural leaders and misfits to discuss the notion of cultural rights as a fundamental right for every citizen.

The democratization of art and culture has never before been more possible than it is now with the web. It’s why we were able to create an independent show like Epic Fu. It’s why many of us are now able to make a living online. It’s also why we must do everything in our power to protect it as a platform for creativity and innovation.

I’m excited to be included in these talks and want to make sure that I include you as well. I’d like to hear what your thoughts are on this subject, so I can share it with the group in Paris.

I’ll be keeping this blog, Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr/Instagram updated with information videos and photos as they come along. So make sure to check in if you’re interested in this topic.

Should cultural rights be a fundamental human right? Should we be able to create without restriction? How does it tie into the current state of politics and technology? And what does it mean as cultural experiences becomes more fractured? How does it separate, how does it unify?

Should be a very interesting discussion. :)

*Cultural Leadership International program, the British Council aims to help a new generation of cultural leaders play an active role in building a more open and tolerant society.

So the question of the day (well, late night) is: Do you prefer to talk or text?

When I first moved out to Los Angeles a neighbor told me that within the first year I would lose 25% of my vocabulary. “The sun,” he said, “it burns the words right off of your brain.” I laughed.

A few years later I realized that he was right, but it wasn’t the sun, it was the 140 character limits, the IMing and texting. I became very used to short bursts of conversation. Impatient to write or read more than a paragraph or two – unless I was reading a book. Even then, my stacks of books started collecting dust on the bookshelf. Production time and video overtook any time I had to write, unless it was a script for the show.

In business, I communicate through email and social networks…

I like talking. I like hearing people’s voices – their intonations. Picking up the phone and talking is so much easier and quicker than going back and forth on IM, which is a time waster when you have coordinate and clarify messages. Also, talking is just a better emotional connector.

But, there is still a part of me, the multi-tasking part, that just finds it easier to text. I can carry on multiple conversations at once. I also find it creatively challenging to construct an IM or a tweet; like a quick and beautiful haiku. Is that just the evolution of communication? Sometimes I imagine that in the far future, thousands of years from now, we will have evolved with no mouths at all.

Our path is toward efficiency and speed. Writing in a journal or hand-writing a long letter to someone you care about – when was the last time you did that? I’ve been urged to keep a hand-written journal, to connect me back to the analog world. I used to keep journals from the time I was in fourth grade to the time I started using the Internet… then my writing and thoughts just became scattered across the web. Some I can no longer find.

Perhaps that’s an entirely different post.

So, what is it? To talk or to text?

Just a little something that made me smile on my birthday. A mantra for 2011, perhaps? ;)