About Me
My upbringing spent between rural southern Virginia and Bavaria gave me a unique perspective on history, culture, and social dynamics. In my life before academia, I worked in marketing and branding where I developed a love for design, order, and interdepartmental collaboration.
As a non-traditional student, I have the clarity of intention as I pursue my academic path. I know what I want to study, I’m proactive in my pursuits, and I am equally unafraid to be changed by it.
My focus is on critical theory through an art historian’s lens. My interests lie in arbitrary systems of power and how they influence through visual culture, as well as who and what resists them.
Big Ideas
My research is grounded in a single conviction: that form is never neutral. Whether in a letterform, a pedagogical method, or a curated image, the structures we inhabit either open or foreclose our capacity to imagine otherwise. I am interested in the historical and material conditions under which people have used art, design, and creative practice to push back against arbitrary systems of power. not as escape, but as a mode of world-making.
My work asks how visual and material culture participates in the reproduction of dominant structures, and more importantly, how it has been used to interrupt them. At the center of this is a belief in relationality; that meaning, identity, and resistance are never individual achievements but emerge from the connections between people, forms, histories, and ways of knowing.
Art & Design History
In form, I anchor in early twentieth century avant garde movements such as Futurism, Vkhutemas, and The Bauhaus, and study letterforms as cultural artifacts.
Critical Theory
My theoretical framework draws on Bourdieu, Foucault, Saussure, LaTour, Derrida, and Bernhard Siegert.
Archives & Rare Books
My research treats curatorial and archival work as praxis. Critical theory is not just applied to material, but produced through active engagement with it.
The foundations of this work build to my larger inquiry of epistemology and ontology, and how Art & Design History functions as a site of resistance, social literacy, and cultural influence. Here, I draw on Arturo Escobar and Enzo Manzini.
Objectives
Academic
Mellon Research Fellow
Summer of 2026
VCU Undergraduate Research & Creative Scholarship
2025-2026
Summer 2026
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Summer 2026
Archives & Rare Books
Critical AI VIP Cohort
Fall 2026
Virginia Commonwealth University
Undergraduate