My work begins with relation.
I am interested in what allows people to remain human with one another, and in the forms through which people create relation, meaning, agency, and belonging together—particularly where those capacities have been damaged or made difficult.
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.
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.