Growing up, I remember watching TV, and I didn't see a lot of people who looked like me, especially someone who passed as a glamorous model on a mainstream TV show.

As a girl growing up in Cyprus, Saudi Arabia and then India, the idea of cracking the industry in America seemed crazy. So thankfully, the way I was raised was to be an open person.

While I was growing up all over, in all my different schools, I was always doing theater, auditioning for plays.

Everything I've done I've always kind of jumped in headfirst, and it's been a learning curve. Even MuchMusic, I had never done live television before, and all of a sudden you show up, and they're like, 'You ready kid? Let's go.'

I think people must wonder how a white girl like me became a blues guitarist. The truth is, I never intended to do this for a living.

Thinking back, the majority of the conflicts I've had in my life have been a result of offering up my two unwelcome cents, crossing that line between constructive truth-telling and preaching.

It's not what you go through, but how that experience affects you. For some people, it could be a near car crash that changes your life. For other people, it could take five years of going to prison for them to realize they need change in their life. So it's not really the experience but more how the experience affects you.

My stated goal as a filmmaker is to feel something. Is to have a palpable emotion in my life, carry it through the gauntlet of the filmmaking process and try and have it land for an audience at some point during the viewing experience. That to me is successful filmmaking.