I grew up with a mother who taught film and a grandmother who was a psychiatrist.

My mother taught film at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and she talked about how to read a film (or any media) the way other people's mothers talked about the weather. The medium is the message. She said it over dinner, over dishes, and in the car with the radio on, and for years I thought it was just a thing people said, like “bless you.” I was well into my teens before I understood she was quoting somebody. She was a single mom and didn’t leave me with babysitters. I would set up my toys in the corner of her classroom, watch all the films and listen to her lectures. When I majored in film in college, I’d already absorbed so much film history, structure, and theory that my classes felt easy and familiar.

My grandmother was a psychiatrist and one of my best friends. She’d tell me stories about being an expert witness on the case of Inez García, a rape victim who killed her rapist, and how what happens in childhood shapes what happens in adulthood. She told me about Freud, Jung, and her own interpretation of their work.

I went into production and stayed for twenty-five years. Broadcast campaigns for Lexus and Häagen-Dazs. Several hundred short documentaries as vice president of production at Brave New Films. Executive producer at Amplifier and TaskForce, agency producer at Team One and Chiat\Day. The projects that worked had a subtext. Somebody in them wanted something they weren't saying. The ones that fell flat got described as structural problems, and they rarely were.

As a producer, I’ve been serving as a Story Therapist on almost every project, sometimes formally. I consulted on The Fluteplayer, which was nominated for an Emmy.

And I was the sole storyteller on a film called Pilar. I produced, directed, shot, and cut it, and it follows my sister through getting a cochlear implant and learning to hear. It won some awards.

I’m also trained as a therapist. It may seem like a pivot, but it doesn’t feel like one to me. I’ve been studying film and psychology for as long as I can remember.

That is what Cognito is. My mother's half and my grandmother's half, integrated.