Hey, I’m Michelle
My art lives somewhere between pain and hope, in the moments when we’re learning to begin again. Welcome, and thank you for being here. <3 I’ve been writing songs for as long as I’ve known how to listen. Words and melody have always been the way I make sense of the world. Before I ever stepped in front of a camera, I was on small stages sharing music, poetry and spoken word, learning how stories can heal when they’re spoken out loud.
As an actor and emerging filmmaker, my latest project, Paper Cranes, is in development, a film about grief, identity, forgiveness, and the quiet ways we find our way home. My work across film and television has been featured on ABC, BET, and at festivals including Tribeca and the Rhode Island International Film Festival. My background in theater includes performances at the TECO Theater at the Straz Center for the Performing Arts, Grand Central Stage, Stageworks, and the Catherine Hickman Theater.
Rooted in Story
As an Afro-Dominican woman and the daughter of an immigrant single mother who served in the U.S. military, I carry the story of a woman who found her new beginning and earned her citizenship in New York City. I come from a nomadic background that deeply informs the stories I tell and how I tell them. Growing up, my older sister and I often stayed with family members while my mom was stationed overseas, and those early experiences of distance, resilience, and reinvention continue to shape my voice as a filmmaker. The loss of my younger sister later in life became another turning point, teaching me that grief can live alongside love and that creation can be an act of remembrance. Her absence continues to inform the way I write, sing, and tell stories, always searching for beauty in the spaces left behind.
As a kid, my family received reduced lunch, and my mom would send me to school with just forty cents for the day. When our home later burned down, taking almost everything we owned, I learned that loss can be both a wound and a teacher. Rebuilding from nothing showed me how beauty can grow out of ruin. Watching my stepfather live with disability, and my mother meet each day with devotion and grace, taught me patience, adaptability, and the quiet strength that keeps families together.
When the world grew a little wider, as a college and graduate student, I sometimes relied on my university’s food pantry while completing my MA in Media and writing my thesis. Those experiences taught me the importance of empathy, representation, and access. I was two years ahead of my class by the time I reached college because, after failing twice before, I passed the college entrance exam on my third attempt during my sophomore year of high school. That early determination to create opportunity out of limitation is something I carry into my filmmaking, where every story I tell is shaped by a deep desire to honor perseverance, vulnerability, and the quiet strength that holds families together.
Why I create
Statistically, my presence behind the camera is part of a small but growing minority. In the wider industry context, the barriers remain very high. From 2018 to 2022, women directed only about 16 percent of feature film releases covered by the Directors Guild of America, and directors of color made up only about 17 percent. Among Hispanic and Latino directors across 2007 to 2022, only 6.1 percent were women and just four were Afro-Latino.
I create to fill the silences that once made me feel invisible. My work is an offering, a way to honor the stories, faces, and voices that have too often been left in the background.
In my attempt to blend raw vulnerability with cinematic storytelling, I made my music debut with the single “Making the Most of It.” My original songs “California, Home” and “I’m Fine, I’m Okay” offer glimpses into my soul, reflecting themes of grief, belonging, and inner strength. Drawing on my roots as a poet and performer, my writing is deeply personal, an ongoing effort to mirror the complexities of being human with honesty and grace.
Music and film have become twin languages for the same truth: that art can hold pain and still turn it into light. Through both, I continue to explore what it means to heal, to hope, and to make meaning out of the things we survive.