A story about the time I had a fake name and worked for the artist Hunt Slonem.

Over the Christmas holidays I had a few down days at home to get my shi*t together. The most joyous hours were spent wading through external hard drives of work. I’ve had such a nuts career, it’s fun to find folders full of life before directing. Case in point: the time I worked for Hunt Slonem. I was illegal and running around New York under the name Emily Banks. I had befriended the real Emily Banks on my second day of living in the United States. Employers wrote me checks to her thinking it was my name, she would cash them, and give me the money. Remember this was the early 2000s. Anyhow that’s the backstory. Hunt Slonem — who as you can tell from these pictures, is a very, very rich, larger than life artist who paints pictures of birds. He also collects plantation homes. I was hired as one of his artist assistants, in charge of photographing and archiving his paintings for his website. I was so scared of him that I preemptively cried on the way to work every day. I was constantly lost, as the studio was over 100 rooms in an old office building that spanned a city block in the West Village. After I stopped working for Hunt Slonem, I went to work for the artist Dennis Oppenheim, but he deserves his own post.