I’ve loved architecture since sixth grade, but first I loved to draw. One day our teacher told us we were going to draw our dream house. So the next day, with my father’s triangle, ruler and sharpened pencil in hand, I dove in! Totally absorbed in drawing the details of the interior spaces of my dream house, it ended up being 95% fenestration. Practically all windows showing everything inside, right down to furniture, plants and the people.

This could have been a sign.

I followed this passion to college by going to architecture school. Graduating in 1999, I worked a few years as an intern in New York and Seattle and soon realized that I hated it. Determined not to be a “CAD Monkey”, I ran for my life toward my art which was drawing, watercolor, poetry, photography, multi-media installations, and documenting everything around me with my video camera. It wasn’t long until I realized that making film/video can encompass all of that. After three years in LA, I found a small documentary studio doing work on sustainable architecture and I jumped on it. Since then, I’ve written, directed, edited and helped produce a few pieces that I’m proud of.

Having merged my heart in film with my heart in architecture, I think I’ve honed in on what I’ve possibly been exploring since sixth grade. That is the inseparable tie between people and place and how fascinating it is to see things form around us, watch them change, and appreciate how some things stay the same. There is no one answer to what a place is and why it has become.

Yet, there is always something to learn about a place and what you learn always tells you something about people. From time to time and from place to place, the more we listen the deeper we understand human beings through the architecture of where we dwell.

I hope you enjoy these explorations into the narratives found in our built environment. May this be a space where we can learn from one another, no matter where we are standing.

– Maya Santos, Director

DIRECTOR’S BIO:

As founder/director of FfF, Maya Santos is also lead editor at Sustainable Media Studio, making short form documentaries with emerging filmmakers and student interns. After graduating with a Bachelor of Architecture from Washington State University in 1999, Maya found her way to videography through her interest in multi-media, coupled with her love of life behind the camera. Maya’s first creation, “Fonogra(Ph)x” (2001), a feature-length documentary and multi-media performance on Filipino DJs and turntablism, was featured in the Northwest Asian American Film Festival in 2002. Her first short film, “to transgress: a meditation” (2006), appeared in various film festivals throughout California and abroad. As an emerging documentary director, beginning with SMS Production’s “Building A” (2010) and as co-director of “A Conversation”(2010), which screened in the 2011 Architecture Film Festival Rotterdam, she makes her narrative directorial debut with “Love Lost on the 405″, which featured at the Architecture and Design Museum as part of the exhibit, Rethink/LA. She recently co-directed “TRACES NO.2: UNION”, which will screen in the 2012 LA Asian Pacific Film Festival.