Artist Statement
I work across photography, moving image, and personal archive to consider how Black, queer, and nonbinary life is seen, constructed, and remembered through images. My practice is shaped by growing up Black and queer in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a place where Black presence was rarely reflected back to me and where otherness became one of the first ways I understood visibility.

That absence shaped my relationship to photography. I became interested in the image not only as a record, but as a space where power is held, negotiated, and sometimes returned. Photography has long carried the weight of being used to classify, flatten, desire, consume, and define people from the outside. My work comes from that tension: the distance between being seen and being understood.

I am interested in what becomes possible when the image is made on our own terms. Through portraiture, moving image, still life, and archival material, I make work that resists a fixed or singular reading. The body, the object, the gesture, the family photograph, and the staged image become places where identity can remain unresolved, contradictory, and alive.

My practice is rooted in the belief that images are weapons. They have been used to define, distort, and disappear us, but they can also be reclaimed. Tenderness is one form that weapon can take. It is not softness alone, but a refusal to harden, a refusal to disappear, and a refusal to become spectacle.

My work is invested in images that do not explain everything they hold. I am drawn to the unstable space between memory and invention, intimacy and distance, protection and exposure. Through still and moving images, I use photography as a way to reclaim presence, question inherited visual narratives, and make room for forms of self-definition beyond the frame imposed by others.