My work begins with relation.
My work asks what allows one life to become perceptible to another, and what forms we can make through which what might otherwise disappear can be witnessed, carried, changed, and passed between us.
Biography
I work across research, writing, teaching, facilitation, organizational life, and social practice.
My earlier work on embodiment and disability led me to questions of trauma, artifacts, archives, and the ways experience becomes narratable. In my current work, I ask how care, safety, and participation are organized in workshops, gatherings, institutions, and shared creative work.
I received my Ph.D. in Art Education from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. I later held a postdoctoral appointment at the University of Michigan’s Barger Leadership Institute and, from 2024 to 2026, was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with UCLA DataX and the Department of Gender Studies. I am now a Research Associate in Social Sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, working with Dr. Regina Langhout.
I serve on the board of Amherst Writers & Artists. I have also worked with the School for Designing a Society, the Association for Contemplative Mind in Higher Education, the Fetzer Institute, Prop Theater, Cunningham Township, the Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center, community organizations, survivors, caregivers, artists, students, physicians, and people with visible and invisible disabilities.
My work is also informed by a long engagement with contemplative studies, pedagogy, and Buddhist practice. Since 2013, I have worked in contemplative higher education through research, teaching, presentations, and organizational consulting, including work with the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society. Beginning in 2020, I undertook formal Buddhist training through Maitreya Buddhist Seminary, completing the Dharma Guardian program and continuing into seminary study. From 2020 to 2022, I lived and practiced at the Ann Arbor Zen Buddhist Temple, where I also served as Assistant to the Director. These experiences continue to inform my approaches to attention, embodiment, artistic practice, teaching, and the conditions through which people encounter one another.
Approach
My method is not simply to study those processes.
I make forms in which people can attend to experience, make something from it, encounter one another, and retain authority over what they share: workshops, meals, exhibitions, houses, writing groups, archives, temporary communities, and collective books. My work is trauma-responsive and disability-informed; those are ethical and methodological commitments within a larger practice of making relation possible.
I am interested in practices that do more than describe harm. I keep returning to what kind of form can hold experience, relation, and collective life: what can be made together while destabilizing conditions are still ongoing, and what becomes possible through the making.
Recent work includes Care Beyond Institutions at SPSSI 2026; Homecoming: Writing, Making, Belonging and Where Is Home? — Mapping Safety, Connection, and Belonging with Cunningham Township; ongoing Art of Loss and writing communities; and continued work on Trauma Diaspora.