Statement
My work draws from my background in cultural anthropology, sociology and literature to examine how racial, political and economic histories shape and transform disparate American and Cuban sub-cultures. For the five years, I’ve studied “casas particulares” -- private homes open to travelers in Cuba -- as sites of contact between private enterprise and communism, borderlands between distinct ideological and economic systems. Casas particulares are inflected by the deep history of United States' historical and political relationship to Cuba, and they ask us to consider the present and future of that relationship. The through line of my work, including more recent work on the rural American south, is the use of photography to confront nostalgia for the “old” through a visual study of modern domestic life at the edge of capitalism and in the legacy of colonial systems. Concurrently, I’m invested in two different projects. One in collaboration with Georgia girls and women, which uses both research and story telling to unpack images of race, domesticity, violence and inequity. Most recently, I’ve been exploring personal, cultural, and social relationships in Texan communities as a lens on the history of feminine identity in the South.