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I grew up in Puerto Rico, in the same house my mother had grown up in. The backyard was enormous, and the trees in it were taller than our house. Leaves came down constantly, and seeds, and I collected them, along with butterflies, worms, and insects I had never seen before and could not name. I went out there often, away from the house, and imagined myself elsewhere entirely. Europe. Africa. Australia. Places I had never been to. Places I always wanted to see. 
Later, I went to some of these places, or places like them. I spent a summer in Barcelona, Spain, studying editorial fashion photography. I went to a sailing camp in Norway. I've hiked the White Mountains of Maine and New Hampshire. The ocean is no exception. I have gotten my Advanced Scuba Diving certification. None of this was research, exactly, though it came to function as research — a way of being somewhere long enough to notice what was actually there, instead of what I had imagined.
At NYU, I studied journalism and anthropology, which is to say I spent four years asking people questions and writing down the answers. I reported and shot video for the university's live broadcast. I worked for two student newspapers, one of them in London. I photographed strangers on the street, and people I knew well, and edited other people's writing into something closer to what they meant. For one semester I excavated archaeological sites in Georgia with a team from the American Museum of Natural History — on my knees in the dirt, which is its own kind of interview.
I am in London now, finishing a master's degree in ethnographic and documentary film at UCL. I am directing a documentary of my own: fieldwork, interviews, the camera, the edit, the sound, the color — all of it, start to finish. The questions have not changed much since the backyard. What is this place. Who is here. What does it look like to someone seeing it for the first time.