PhD Candidate
Geography | University of California, Berkeley
I am a PhD Candidate in the Department of Geography and a practicing filmmaker and photographer. I combine my training in oral history, archival work, and community-based research methods with my more than ten years as a practicing photographer and filmmaker to address questions of space, political-economy, race and gender, and aesthetics. My work is generously supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues Graduate Fellowship, the John L. Simpson Pre-Dissertation Research Fellowship, and the Social Sciences Research Pathways Program.
Current Project
My current research project is titled "Racial-Gendered Aesthetics of Rupture and Care: Visual Imaginaries of Oakland and Berkeley." I plan to finish my dissertation work in the Spring of 2026. My research contributes to visual and cultural studies, Black geographies, and photographic and film production, showing how racial regimes of representation are shaped through spatial-aesthetic techniques. Beyond adjudicating the value of visual representations and deliberating on their intended and unintended cultural meanings and discursive consequences, I investigate the technical construction of images and spatial aesthetics like urban design. I interrogate the power of aesthetic projects that not only attempt to represent the world but to actively structure the way we see and understand social problems, historical narratives, and thepast, present, and possible futures of people and places, and their relationships to one another. As a filmmaker and photographer, I extend this scholarly work into community-based documentary filmmaking and documentary portraiture – acts of spatial memory preservation and theses and promises on the future of the places in which my East Bay Area community partners reside.
Winner: 2025 Clyde Woods
Graduate Student Paper Award, Black Geographies Specialty Group
American Association of Geographers
For my paper "Framing Displacement," my first chapter of my dissertation, on urban documentary photography aesthetics and Oakland's continued practice of Black displacement across its history through visual racial imaginaries.
CV
Community-Based Media Projects
My community-engaged work spans a broad range of projects and roles: documentary photography and videography for local organizations, collaborative short film projects, public history work, and grant-funded media justice projects in collaboration with community partners.
Awardee: 2025 Chancellor's Community Partnership Fund
University of California Chancellor's Office
For my project, collaboratively led with La Peña Cultural Center: Cultural Archives in Motion: Community Editors Traineeship.
La Peña Cultural Center sits upon a vast, largely untapped digital archive of cultural performances and community events, and maintains a loose network of youth, QTPOC audiovisual technicians-in-training ready for activation. This program will create a cohort of Editors that will use archival and concurrent video of cultural events and performance at La Peña to expand the reach of artists and the profile of La Peña and Berkeley as places where emerging and establish artists come to feature their work. We will develop a cohort of young editors who critically engage the practice of community-based media projects and sustain La Peña's media efforts for years to come. Editors will produce
professional quality video showcasing the diverse talent that the City and Center attract.
