"The work of the artist is to turn her rage into flowers."

I am a scholar, educator, writer, and artist whose work has been shaped by a deep curiosity about people: how we tell stories, create meaning, move through cultures, respond to injustice, and imagine worlds different from the ones we inherit. For more than a decade, teaching has taken me across classrooms, countries, disciplines, and age groups. I began as an eighth-grade English teacher before moving to South Korea, where I taught English to young learners. From there, my work took me to Dhaka, Bangladesh, where I founded and directed a writing center, and to Kolkata, India, where I developed the curriculum for and directed UDITA, a nine-month English literacy, career-readiness, and women’s empowerment program. I later moved into higher education in the United States, teaching at Washington State University, the University of Idaho, and Lewis-Clark State College before spending five years at New York University Abu Dhabi. Across these institutions, I have taught writing, composition, rhetoric, research, literature, poetry, visual and cultural analysis, and interdisciplinary courses across the humanities and liberal arts. My classrooms have brought together students with extraordinarily different languages, cultures, religions, socioeconomic backgrounds, abilities, experiences, and ways of seeing the world. That diversity has fundamentally shaped the educator—and the scholar—I have become. My academic work is similarly interdisciplinary. I hold master’s degrees in English Literature, Religions of the World, and Sociocultural Anthropology, and I am completing a PhD in Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam. My research sits at the intersections of visual culture, aesthetics, literature, feminism, activism, religion, and social justice. Over the years, I have written and presented on subjects ranging from representations of trauma in multimodal literature and critical pedagogy to cultural eunuchism, religious kitsch, and transnational feminist art movements. Much of my recent research asks what happens when art moves - across borders, political struggles, communities, and cultural contexts. My doctoral research examines the aesthetics and collective practices of the Fearless Collective and the possibilities of transnational feminist art as a form of solidarity, resistance, and world-making. I am also developing the concept of transversive reclamation to describe the ways visual interventions can carry political struggles beyond the communities and geographic spaces in which they originate. Across these projects, I remain interested in the capacity of aesthetics not simply to represent the world, but to intervene in it. My scholarship has taken me to conferences across multiple countries, and my publications span English, education, cultural analysis, and interdisciplinary scholarship. Increasingly, however, my engagement with visual culture has also moved beyond writing about art and toward making it. My own developing artistic practice works across paint and mixed media, allowing me to explore some of the same questions that animate my scholarship through color, texture, form, and material experimentation. Travel has been another kind of education. I have traveled to more than fifty countries, and some of my most meaningful learning has happened far beyond formal classrooms: in museums and street markets, over unfamiliar meals, in conversations with strangers, amid public art, on trains, and while wandering cities without much of a plan. I am endlessly curious about how people live, create, remember, resist, celebrate, and make places their own.