From the Field to the Stage to a Docuseries

How a Facebook message, a genre pivot, and a dance ensemble led to a Canadian documentary about disability history — and what it taught me about saying yes.

Every photographer has a pivot moment.

Mine started on the field — not the stands. For years, I had field access, shooting my son during his college career as a wide receiver. That proximity changes everything. You're not watching football; you're inside it. The hits are louder. The routes develop right in front of you. You live or die by your ability to read the play before it unfolds.

But somewhere around his sophomore or junior year, I started doing something unexpected — I began stepping into dance venues on the side. Football on Saturdays. Dance on weekends. The pivot didn't wait for the final whistle.

The Overlap

Being on the field — not in the press box, not in the stands — does something to a photographer. You are inside the chaos, not observing it. A 220-pound linebacker is running a route that ends near your lens. You learn to read bodies in space out of necessity. You develop an instinct for where energy is traveling before it arrives. You stop flinching and start anticipating.

What's interesting is that the pivot didn't wait for football to end. While I was still on the field on Saturdays, I started showing up in darkened theatres on weekends. Two completely different worlds — stadium lights and crowd noise on one side, stage lights and silence on the other — and I was living in both at the same time. The same eye, two very different languages.

That overlap mattered. I wasn't abandoning one thing for another; I was discovering that what I'd built on the field could translate somewhere I'd never thought to look.

How It Started

The connection that launched my dance photography wasn't a formal introduction or a planned career move. Maria Daniel — founder of iDanceMinistry — reached out through a Facebook group we happened to share. She was organizing an ensemble dance event featuring multiple companies and was in need of a photographer.

I said yes.

That first performance marked the beginning of something I didn't yet have a name for. Maria's world is different from a football stadium. The stakes feel quieter on the surface but are just as high. These are companies of dedicated artists — dancers who've trained for years, who pour something real and irreplaceable into every performance. Getting it wrong with a camera isn't just a missed shot. It's a missed record of something that happened once and won't happen exactly that way again.

I came back for the second performance. By then, I'd started to understand the rhythms of ensemble dance — how the stage fills and empties, how light changes meaning depending on where a body is standing in it, how stillness inside a performance is often more charged than movement. My football instincts translated in ways I hadn't expected.

Years on the field — inside the play, not above it — trains an eye that doesn't switch off. Anticipating a receiver breaking off the line and anticipating a dancer mid-turn: the instinct is the same.

And one of the companies performing that second night was Kitty Lunn's Infinity Dance Theater.

Who Was on That Stage

Kitty Lunn is one of the most influential figures in the disability arts movement. A professional dancer whose career changed course after a serious spinal injury, she founded Infinity Dance Theater in New York City on a single conviction: that disability is not a limitation to be accommodated, but a perspective to be centered.

The company works with dancers of all abilities, creating choreography where the wheelchair is an instrument — not an accommodation — and where differently-bodied performers build movement together that neither could produce alone.

I didn't know the full weight of all that when I raised my camera. I knew I was watching something that carried meaning. The performance had a quality that made you lean forward — not out of curiosity, but out of recognition. Something true was happening on that stage.

I came away with photographs I was quietly proud of. Filed them away. Life continued.

The Message

Then came the email from Michael Marlatt, archival producer on an AMI-tv docuseries called History in 60 — a Canadian series documenting disability history one episode at a time. The episode on dance was coming together. They wanted to include Kitty Lunn as an international figure who had shaped the field.

They had found my photographs.

The ones from my second dance performance ever. The ensemble night with Maria. From a connection made through a Facebook group I almost wasn't in.

Infinity Dance Theater had already given its blessing. Now, Michael was reaching out to ask if the production could use my images.

AMI (Accessible Media Inc.) is a Canadian not-for-profit broadcaster dedicated entirely to disability-related programming. History in 60 explores chapters of disability history in Canada — stories of culture, advocacy, and artistry that too often go untold. The dance episode places Kitty Lunn alongside Canadian figures who shaped the field, weaving an international story of what becomes possible when you refuse to be told the stage isn't for you.

Photographs from my second dance performance. Images I made while still learning how to photograph movement that wasn't a wide receiver breaking off the line. Those frames are headed to a documentary about disability history on a national Canadian broadcaster.

You Never Know Where a Single Frame Will Take You

Say yes to the message from someone you don't know well. Show up for the second performance. Keep shooting through the uncertainty of a new genre.

The camera doesn't care that you're figuring it out — it just records what's in front of you. Sometimes what's in front of you turns out to matter more than you knew. That's the thing about photography. You don't always get to see the full arc of what you've made. Sometimes it takes years. Sometimes it takes a producer in Canada.

But it starts the same way every time — by showing up.