My Research

How can feminist art build solidarity across radically different cultural and political contexts without erasing the differences between them? Centered on the transnational work of the Fearless Collective, this doctoral project examines how feminist visual practices travel, gather communities, and create spaces for collective attention, beauty, and resistance. Drawing on fieldwork, interviews, visual analysis, and cultural theory across multiple sites, the project considers aesthetics as an infrastructure through which feminist relationships and alternative ways of being together can be built.

What happens when art creates relationships between people and places? Dissertation - Book manuscript in progress

This project examines David LaChapelle’s religious imagery as a contemporary visual theology of celebrity, asking what happens when living bodies are transformed into objects of collective belief. Through LaChapelle’s hyper-saturated reworkings of Christian iconography, celebrities become contemporary saints, martyrs, Madonnas, and Christs - figures simultaneously worshipped, judged, consumed, and disciplined by the cultures that elevate them. Rather than treating kitsch as merely artificial, excessive, or irreverent, the project argues that LaChapelle mobilizes its aesthetic excess as an ethical interruption: collapsing the distance between worship and harm, spectacle and intimacy, sanctity and flesh. In doing so, his photographs ultimately ask what remains of the human being beneath the icon - and what responsibility belongs to those who participate in their elevation.

What happens when we project belief onto bodies and images? Article under review

What happens when the imagery of one political struggle appears somewhere else? This developing project introduces transversive reclamation as a framework for understanding visual interventions that carry political struggles beyond the geographic and cultural spaces in which they originate. Through transnational examples of protest art and public imagery, the project examines how images are reclaimed, recontextualized, and mobilized across borders - and asks when such acts create meaningful solidarity, when they transform the politics of the original struggle, and when they risk appropriation or erasure.

What happens when political images move between places? Ongoing inquiry

Motherhood in literature is often organized around familiar expectations of sacrifice, devotion, and unconditional love. This developing comparative project turns instead toward motherhood’s shadows: resentment, obligation, bodily vulnerability, ambivalence, dependence, and imperfect care. Reading Claudia Piñeiro’s Elena Knows alongside Avni Doshi’s Burnt Sugar, the project examines literary mothers and daughters who resist idealized narratives of maternal intimacy, asking what becomes visible when motherhood is understood not as an instinctive moral identity but as a complicated, embodied, and sometimes contradictory relationship.

What happens when cultural ideals are projected onto intimate human relationships and bodies? Ongoing inquiry