I have a Ph.D. in gender studies with a critical and structural focus on the US American foster care system, women of color feminisms, and social practice arts. I maintain an artistic grounding in theatre & performance with additional training and experience in costuming, production, and creative writing. In April of 2020, I defended my dissertation project, "Sensing the State, Strategizing Survival: Foster Care and the Ordering of Spacetimebodyminds". In the project, I use feminist sensory ethnography and art (zine-making, theatre, drawing) to highlight the strategies for survival those who aged-out of the foster care system in Arizona employ and create to lead lives they deem worth living. In this endeavor I asked people what their definitions of success are, what major events happened in their lives, how they learned to navigate the foster care system, and if/how being in foster care shapes their lives currently as alumni. I am curious to see how people exist, resist, survive, and thrive in and through state violence (and not everyone does) and the ways people heal, nourish themselves and others, and understand systems and structures of power. This research is grounded in intersectional feminist and abolitionist theory and practice drawing upon Black Feminist Thought, Indigenous feminisms, Chicanx feminisms, and disability feminisms. Throughout the multihyphenate project I also engage with liberatory arts practices, performance as research, and resistance culture writ large.For the last seven years I've been a collegiate educator and K-12 teaching artist. In the summer of 2022 I launched Skeleton Key Creativity, a creative consulting and educational firm. I worked in various capacities managing projects, creating curriculum, facilitating workshops, and producing events. I did this as as a teaching artist, civic youth coach, and equity consultant. This structure allowed me to bring arts-integrated teaching artistry and liberatory pedagogy into social service organizations, teacher training, civic-based projects, and k-12 educational programs.
