Researcher · writer · social practice artist
I am interested in what allows people to remain human with one another.
I work under conditions that damage belonging—trauma, displacement, homelessness, institutional violence, precarity, and isolation—and with the writing, objects, gatherings, and shared work through which people make home, narrative, and relationship.
The connective tissue
My work moves between studying these processes and making places for them to happen: workshops, meals, exhibitions, houses, writing groups, archives, temporary communities, and collective books. A poem, a body map, or an object can carry questions that also belong in research.
Areas of practice
One practice, several forms
Research & organizational learning
Qualitative and mixed-methods inquiry, program evaluation, and careful study of how people experience institutions, leadership, care, and change.
Writing & facilitation
Trauma-responsive and disability-informed writing spaces where people make meaning, develop craft, and participate without coercion.
Social practice
Public and community-based work that uses art, gathering, publication, and shared inquiry to create forms of belonging.
Writing, film & book arts
Scholarship and creative work across poetry, essays, handmade books, exhibitions, performance, image, and film.
Selected contexts
Research, teaching, facilitation, and public work across institutions and communities.
I am a Research Associate in Social Sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, working with Dr. Regina Langhout. My UCLA DataX and Gender Studies postdoctoral fellowship ran from 2024 to 2026. Current work also includes Amherst Writers & Artists, Cunningham Township, and community arts programs. Explore the project archive → View the professional record →
Current work
Research brought into public practice
Community program · Urbana
Homecoming: Writing, Making, Belonging
A trauma-responsive arts and writing program developed with Cunningham Township for people navigating housing and financial insecurity, grief, disability, addiction, and social isolation.
Book in progress
Trauma Diaspora
A book project on trauma, archives, embodiment, and the material and social practices through which people live with what cannot simply be repaired or left behind.
Exhibition · September 29, 2026
Where Is Home?
Making Safety, Connection, and Belonging brings work from 2012, 2018, 2024, and the current Homecoming workshops into relation at the Housing Matters Conference. The question of home returns through houses, bodies, objects, poems, and the work of getting together.
Work with me
Come to a workshop. Meet with me one on one. Invite me to work with your group.
Workshops
Join a writing group or arts-based workshop. Some groups meet over time; others are built for a particular community or occasion.
One-on-one consulting or coaching
Bring me what you are writing, making, researching, or trying to work through. We can begin with a conversation about the kind of attention your work needs.
Organizations & groups
I work with groups on research, curriculum, facilitation, public programs, and the forms of participation that hold them together.