PhD Candidate
Geography | University of California, Berkeley
I am a PhD Candidate in the Department of Geography and a filmmaker and photographer. I combine my training in oral history, archival work, and community-based research methods with practice as a photographer and filmmaker to address questions of space, political-economy, race and gender, and aesthetics.
My work is generously recognized by the College Arts Association, 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.
Racial-Spatial Aesthetics: Racialized Visualities
and the Politics of Space
The power to codify the relationship between racialized space and resources is as much a legislative, economic, and discursive effort to manage racial space as it is visual – this is the heart of my research. My research sits at the intersection of visual and cultural studies, Black geographies, and photographic and film production, showing how cities marshal aesthetic projects—journalistic photography, architecture, film, and design—to delineate belonging and racial difference in space. I examine how visual artifacts operate not only as representations but as spatial instruments that organize urban life, regulate access to resources, and shape racialized imaginaries of futurity.
My dissertation, Racial-Spatial Aesthetics: Racialized Visualities and the Politics of Space, sits at the intersection of visual and cultural studies, Black geographies, and photographic and film production. Through a case study of Oakland and Berkeley, California—spanning key turning points in the racial-spatial character of both cities from the nineteenth through the twenty-first centuries—it examines how cities marshal racial-aesthetic projects to implement, justify, and anticipate colonial-capitalist futures on the landscape. While critical visual and cultural studies has investigated representational politics—the tropes, narratives, and fantasies embedded within images—this project advances the field by emphasizing the aesthetic techniques and spatial operations of visual artifacts, situating them within Black geographic theories of space, power, and racial capitalism. Drawing on archival research, visual analysis, and my own photographic and film practice, I read across journalistic photography, architecture, and urban design to trace how racial-spatial constructions have shaped both cities’ divergent yet interconnected histories and cultural legacies.
Across these case studies, Racial-Spatial Aesthetics theorizes racial-aesthetic projects as visual operations that impose racial frames of vision and organization onto urban space. I show how images and aesthetics—whether journalistic, architectural, or participatory—operate spatially to organize urban life, regulate belonging, and imagine racialized futurities, while also illuminating the aesthetic practices through which Black, Indigenous, and diasporic communities reimagine the possibilities of space and collective life.
Winner: 2025 Clyde Woods Graduate Student Paper Award
Black Geographies Specialty Group, American Association of Geographers
For my paper developed from my first dissertation chapter: "Framing Displacement, Forcing Perspective." Building on visual studies, cultural studies, and Black geographic theory, I analyze a set of images produced by photographic journalists in Oakland covering the crisis of homelessness in the city. I show how the aesthetic techniques in these images, such as framing, scale, color, contrast, and shape construct an artificial sense of Black unbelonging. Put in larger historical context of decades of Black displacement in the city, I argue that these visual-spatial strategies further a forced perspective which attempts to structure white spatial normativity in space.
My article currently has an R&R with Antipode.
CV
Research-Driven, Community-Based Media Projects
I developed my dissertation work through community- based media projects in the Bay Area, combining my research and creative practice to produce: two collaborative short films, a series of photographic projects, and curatorial work for a museum exhibition. These projects functioned both as the site of my work and as research outputs that communicate academic work to larger audiences.
