I work in the Arts Administration Program at Teachers College, Columbia University, where I’ve been a faculty member since 2022. Using ethnographic and archival methods, I study how social inequalities are experienced, maintained, and challenged in artistic careers, organizations, transactions, and built environments.

Based on research I did at the MoMA Film Department in New York City and Cineteca Nacional in Mexico City, I’m writing a book about the ways in which curatorial working conditions and resources (e.g. contracts, stipends, exhibition space) shape decision-making and risk-taking, and, in turn, the type of cinema culture that becomes available to the public.

In my current project, I’m learning about how Indigenous and Native artists navigate their careers and economic exchanges at the intersection of market logics and ancestral ways of making and knowing. To that end. I’m studying art worlds in the U.S. and its borderlands through the lens of Indigenous knowledges to decenter the homogenous interpretation of aesthetic value that has dominated the sociology of art.

In the Peruvian Andes, I’ve been developing an audiovisual archive in Chinchero, a rural Quechua town, since 2014. There, I use my camera to examine how economic development and colonialism manifest on Indigenous land. For this project, I have been collecting video to witness and memorialize how the arrival of an international airport materializes through landscapes, built environments, and other forms of cultural expression, even years before the construction of the airport began.

My research work has been possible thanks to the National Endowment for the Arts, Mellon Foundation, Fulbright Program, Institute for Critical Social Inquiry, Berlin Summer School in Social Sciences, Janey Program in Latin American Studies, my parents’ love, and student debt. At The New School, I completed my doctoral degree in sociology thanks to a Dean’s fellowship and a dissertation award.