For more than fifteen years, I’ve been asking:

How do people understand difficult ideas?

That question first drew me to filmmaking, then journalism, and eventually science communication. Today, it’s at the center of everything I do: designing explanations that make complex ideas intuitive without sacrificing their depth.

Through hundreds of interviews with scientists and years of explaining frontier research to broad audiences, I've come to believe that people rarely struggle because ideas are inherently difficult. More often, explanations assume mental models that audiences haven't yet had the chance to build. My work focuses on constructing those models one layer at a time through narrative, visual design, and carefully sequenced conceptual scaffolding.

I'm the Director of Video at Quanta Magazine, where I built the publication's video operation from the ground up. Over the past six years, I've developed its editorial standards, series, visual language, production systems, team, and YouTube strategy, helping grow the channel into one of the world's leading destinations for explanatory science journalism. Through explainers, video journalism, and short documentaries, we translate frontier research in mathematics, physics, biology, computer science, and artificial intelligence into stories for audiences from experts to curious newcomers.

Along the way, our work has reached more than 1.2 million subscribers and 85+ million lifetime views, and contributed to Quanta's Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the James Webb Space Telescope.

My work lives at the intersection of journalism, video, learning design, visual communication, and creative direction. Rather than simplifying ideas, I'm interested in translating them. Over the years, I’ve developed an approach to explanatory storytelling that draws on first-principles explanation, conceptual scaffolding, progressive disclosure, visual metaphor, and narrative structure to help audiences construct durable mental models.

I'm also interested in building systems that enable ambitious creative work to scale without sacrificing craft. At Quanta, I've developed editorial methodologies, production playbooks, and collaborative workflows that help multidisciplinary teams consistently produce high-quality visual journalism. More recently, I've been exploring how AI can augment research and project management.

Before Quanta, I founded The Atlantic Selects, an original documentary initiative at The Atlantic, where I commissioned and produced videos while leading YouTube strategy, growing the channel to more than 400 million lifetime views. (Our most-watched video has 12 million views!) Alongside that work, I wrote about science, technology, and culture for The Atlantic, collaborating across reporting, video, and design to tell stories in whatever medium best suited the idea.

Earlier, I served as Managing Editor of No Film School, where I led editorial operations, expanded the publication’s coverage of the international film industry, and co-created/hosted the site’s popular podcast.

Before that, I was a writer and film critic at Indiewire, where I interviewed hundreds of filmmakers, reviewed films, and helped grow the publication's social audience by more than 300 percent. Those years taught me how to ask better questions and why certain stories resonate. In 2014, Filmmaker Magazine interviewed me about my approach to film criticism.

Before journalism, I worked as a Creative Executive in independent film development, where I helped discover and develop Infinitely Polar Bear, a Sundance Grand Jury Prize nominee acquired by Sony Pictures Classics.

I regularly speak about explanatory storytelling, visual journalism, and science communication, most recently at the Santa Fe Institute.

I also serve as a judge and juror for journalism and film awards, including the 2025 Science & Technology Emmy Awards, the New Orleans Film Festival, the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, and DOC NYC. I graduated from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts with a B.F.A. in Film Production.

In 2008, my sister Sarah Buder and I co-authored Letters to a Bullied Girl, published by HarperCollins. The book grew out of a community service project we started after learning that a girl in our community was being bullied. In 2011, we were honored at the White House by President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama for our work to combat bullying.