At the heart of David’s various projects lies storytelling as a craft, an art and a means to engage people in ways that bring them joy. His work continually aims to bring something new to the world, while drawing on some of the most historically important myths and symbols in human history. To design a website about an Indigenous community, he spent years asking them to help him produce the project in their language and in their aesthetic form. That website was heralded in 2003 as the “first ethnographic website.” Deciding that the community where he worked deserved to benefit from non-written representations in media, David received a National Science Foundation grant to return to their pueblos with a cinematographer. David's unique and multidimensional approach to producing and directing his first film, Cutting the Cord, resulted in a documentary that is the first ethnographic film to be narrated by dozens of people, in three languages, and to show the never before recorded tribal ceremony releasing people from grief.
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Years later, he completed the first ever Indigenous language wiki to assist people in learning their community’s heritage language. His book, We Will Dance Our Truth, was the first ethnographic book that included fieldnote, journal entries, archive reports, and scholarly theoretical writing, winning the Chicago Prize in 2008. His Archive of Healing was the first website to provide visitors the ability to search the largest digitized database of saying about healing from around the world, while also relying on David’s model for protecting intellectual property. This digital project was heralded by The Smithsonian Magazine, Atlas Obscura, and NPR’s Good Food.
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In his pursuit to tell stories that matter, he then began writing about the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence, leading his writing to be referenced in Undark Magazine and The New York Times Magazine. His pieces on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence led to multiple podcast and interview appearances (see Conversations). For four months in 2022, David was the most quoted professor at UCLA across news services. His writing continued to build an audience outside the realm of scholarly publications.
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With some help of friends, David has been able to transition to a larger venue for his storytelling. In 2023, MGM optioned one of his essays for an episodic series based on his childhood in the house of a curandera. Currently in negotiations, that story portrays the not yet seen quotidian life of Latinx spirituality in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.
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David has recently begun working on his latest storytelling venture, a film about his father’s clandestine work on UFO retrieval. Harnessing the authenticity of his dad’s true story of not wanting to be a dead whistleblower, David relies on recorded conversations before his dad’s death: a conversation that entails all matters of extra-terrestrials, missile ranges, secret hangars in the desert, and abductions that remain beyond belief.
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David has been fortunate to consult for most of the major studios in Los Angeles. His work on the set (and in the trailer) of Paranormal Activity III brought to life for David the power of storytelling in the visual medium. Having spent years on film and TV productions, he continually asks how storytelling can remain vital in an age of machine learning. He remains committed to preserving the writer’s voice whether in written or visual form, aiming to share stories with people that can help them expand what they consider possible and valuable in their lives.
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David's 2009 book was shortlisted for several regional prizes before being chosen for a national book award, The Chicago Prize. The book featured a growing writing genre in anthropology called “autoethnography,” which is when the author foregoes the appearance of objectivity in order to reach deeper truths about the relationship of the researcher with their research. Pulling from his own fieldnotes and journal entries provided David the opportunity to mine his own biography for a form of storytelling that moves beyond the scholarly world.
David went on to publish more scholarship that relied on personal narrative, including his own childhood of being raised by his powerful Mexican grandmother while his father was mostly absent working on clandestine research across the deserts of New Mexico during the golden age of UFOs after Roswell, the incident. These scholarly essays have become the beating heart of other projects.
His 2022 essay on rethinking alien contact, “On the Frontiers,” went on to be cited by both Undark Magazine and the New York Times Magazine as influencing the contemporary conversation about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. In 2023, MGM optioned the rights to David's “A Borderlands Methodology,” which tells the story of a professor trying to reconcile the curanderismo of his childhood with the scientific worldview of a university professor. David has gone on to develop treatments for both an episodic series of a professor of the paranormal and a scripted film about his father’s work on UFO research. He is currently represented by Verve/Paradigm Los Angeles.