Born and raised in the arts and culture district of Cleveland, Ohio as the daughter of a musician and social worker, I have always been interested in the relationship between public storytelling, cultural production, and social identity.

I found my home in books, photography, and mission-driven public arts initiatives that bring the creative world to bear on social issues, and pursued a PhD in American Culture to give me nimble tools to tell more complex stories.

In the years following from 2020-2023 I turned towards scholar-advocacy, helping public humanities faculty, department chairs, and deans at colleges and universities build better public humanities training programs as Project Director of Humanities for All at the National Humanities Alliance. Informed by Critical University Studies and an American Studies and African-American Studies scholarly tradition, I have consulted on the creation of public humanities certificate programs, PhD’s, master’s programs, and internships that prepare students to use their humanities education to engage the public on the topics that they are most passionate about.

My forthcoming book (April 2024), The Routledge Companion to Public Humanities Scholarship, under contract with Routledge, Taylor, and Francis and coedited with Daniel Fisher-Livne, gathers together the current aims and scope of public humanities scholarship in U.S. higher education–an impossible though altogether wonderful task. It does so primarily via case studies of exemplary works of public humanities teaching, research, and programming directed by college and university affiliates, including students, faculty, and staff. 

In my own writing I am motivated to write for and with many different types of public audiences, with written work appearing in The New York Times, American Quarterly, Tiya Miles’ All That She Carried, The Public Historian, and The Black Aesthetic Vol III. As a researcher of American culture, I specialize in Black visual and material culture and photography with emphases on women and gender, interracial kinship, social and political movements, and family history. However, my favorite “choice of weapons,” as Gordon Parks says, is my dad’s old 35mm film camera.

Currently, I am curator of DC’s Commission on the Arts and Humanities, where I manage the District’s gallery as well as a number of grant lines for visual artists and curators in the region.

Open to opportunities to combine my passions for storytelling, photography, curation, and consulting.