Burning Too Close to Home is a long-form multimedia reporting and design project investigating the 2018 Woolsey Fire and its impact on Malibu’s working-class community.

The project blends memoir, investigative journalism, oral history, archival research, and data visualization to examine how wildfire functions as both an environmental phenomenon and a systemic failure. Rather than treating the Woolsey Fire as an isolated event, the work situates it within a broader landscape of land mismanagement, climate change, development in fire-prone zones, and uneven emergency response.

At the center of the project are the voices of those most often excluded from dominant wildfire narratives: multigenerational residents, renters, laborers, and families for whom Malibu is not a luxury destination but a place of work, history, and survival. Through in-depth interviews, a detailed fire timeline, and place-based reporting, Burning Too Close to Home documents how disaster unfolds unevenly—and how resilience often emerges from community rather than institutions.

Developed over multiple years, the project uses visual systems and editorial design to make complex information legible without flattening its emotional weight. The result is a body of work that bridges data and lived experience, arguing that wildfire is not just a natural disaster, but a human one—shaped by decisions, omissions, and long-standing inequities.