Yá'át'ééh [Hello]

I am an advanced PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at New York University where I also completed a certificate in Culture and Media (2015). I earned a B.A. in Interdisciplinary Humanities and Spanish from the University of San Diego (2006) and an M.A. in Museum Anthropology from the University of Denver (2011). Currently, I hold a 2017-2018 Andrew W. Mellon Native American Scholars Initiative Fellowship at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, PA.

My dissertation project, Permeable: Diné Politics of Extraction and Exposure, approaches territorial dispossession and environmental toxicity as pervasive features of contemporary Indigenous life. Based on over 15 months of ethnographic research on the Navajo Nation, my research engages local modes of relating, both in its political and kinship imaginings, to understand the sociopolitical context of sovereign action and environmental contamination among Diné communities of present-day northern Arizona and New Mexico. Themes of environmental contamination and settler colonialism interrogated in this project are central to my ongoing media work in the mediums of photography and filmmaking. 

My academic, political, and personal commitments are centered in Diné Bikéyah, the home that I carry with me and the home to which I always return.