I grew up in Indonesia and Senegal in a religious boarding school. My father is Afghan and Russian, and my mother is Filipino/Chinese with Black indigenous roots.

Growing up, Whiteness and heteronormativity were the penultimate passports to privilege. As a biracial brown girl, I didn’t quite know how to define myself.

As an adult, that lingering sense of otherness persisted. I became fascinated with the margins. My graduate research looked at Asian and African diasporic literature.

The whole time that I have lived in Indianapolis, I have lived in the Haughville neighborhood. That landscape asks me to challenge my own privilege daily.

I am an Indianapolis-based artist. My art is grounded in my cultural experience as a young, brown, queer immigrant mother, and I draw the most inspiration from the clash of the natural world and the urban landscape that I inhabit.

Much of my work focuses on the margins-the margins of respectability, of race, of culture, and of sexuality. I use hyper-local materials like wood scavenged from the White River or urban trees that I mill myself. I find prophetic revelation and inspiration in the continued work of the confluence of ecology and artistry.