about
Across a wide spectrum of projects, Kim discovers the beating heart of the narrative to unlock the story within.
She tells stories in multiple forms, from filmmaking to print journalism to website content.
The through line of her work is the exploration of the ways in which creativity is practiced by individuals and groups. Informed by an abiding sense of curiosity, she asks questions that illuminate the subject and move people into awareness, empathy, and action.
Here's her story.
She began telling stories as a child in Baltimore, Maryland. She wrote and directed the sixth grade play, Bills, Bills, Bills, inspired by her father's frequent laments. In ninth grade, she penned an essay on helping women in domestic violence situations that aired on local radio. In eleventh grade, her essay comparing Neil Young's song After the Gold Rush to the experience of the Puritans led her teacher to write in her yearbook, 'you're the kind of student that made me want to be a teacher.'
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She combined her love of writing and of living in service to a community by becoming a grant writer. In the 1980s, she began in Flagstaff, Arizona. At Coconino Center for the Arts, she wrote her first grant and produced her first performing arts series. Ultimately, she put those skills to work when the Center faced closure by leading a coalition of elected officials, artists, organizational leaders, and citizens. Those collective efforts sustained and expanded the Center's mission to include both the arts and sciences. Most importantly, they kept the doors open, and The Center continues to serve the people of Northern Arizona to this day.
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She then went further west to Los Angeles, where over the course of more than two decades, she raised millions of dollars through grant proposal writing and event production for literary and performing arts organizations, such as Get Lit - Words Ignite, Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles, and Will Geer's Theatricum Botanicum, among others.
She pivoted out of arts and culture organizations to serve as Associate Director of the Centers for Research on Creativity in LA, where she managed and contributed to the design of multiple, simultaneous studies and wrote and edited reports for clients such as the Alameda County Office of Education, Inner City Arts, The Royal Blind School of Scotland, The Walt Disney Company, and The Wooden Floor, among many others.
In her own community, she co-founded Topanga Authors' Group and the Transport Topanga Literary Festival. She earned her Master’s degree in Creativity Studies in 2021 from the State University of New York at Buffalo, where she received the Mary C. Murdock Creative Spirit Award.
In 2022, for the first time, she applied her grant writing skills to her own project — writing, directing and producing the short documentary Beyond the Bridge. She matched the $10,000 artist award from Community Engagement by conducting an individual donor campaign. The film has screened at festivals, in school classrooms, and at creativity conferences.
In 2024, she workshopped her first novel at Sackett Street Writers in Brooklyn, NY and is currently in the rewrite process.
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I dwell in possibility. Emily Dickinson