Photo by Murph Phi
I'm a creative writer working across photo, film, and video installation. I hold a MFA in Visual Arts from UC San Diego and a BA in English from CSU Long Beach. My research focuses on understanding how culture, family, and kinship systems shape social and sexual consciousness, and the ways minoritized groups make meaning under changing political landscapes. My work covers topics on displacement and placemaking, embodied knowledge and spirituality, religion and the speculative.
My practice transformed after clocking over 1,000 hours of intensive barber training and earning professional licensure. While working behind the chair, I experimented with new expressive forms, materials, and processes. As a masculine-of-center woman, I anticipated how my nonconformance would disrupt hypermasculine barbershops and hyperfem salons. By queering those spaces, I explored the nuances of cultural performance more intimately. On doing cultural ethnography, David Guss notes, "What is important is that cultural performances be recognized as sites of social action where identities and relations are continually being reconfigured." Cutting alongside colleagues established the trust necessary for engaging in shop talk that contested cis/normative perceptions of gender, sexuality, and belonging. While the hard lines of difference would gradually fade, hostility persisted among transient clientele.
From these experiences, I constructed broader interpretations of art- and sense-making, intimacy, safety, and community, which Bryant Keith Alexander describes as being “built on and around communicative and discursive strategies that mark shared interests and desire.” If blackness and queerness function within, against & beyond the purview of dominant culture, then the goal of my research is to know how minoritized groups respond and use aesthetics to reconfigure their social and cultural landscapes.
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View my: CV