My research practice is grounded in landscape as an expanded conceptual field—one that encompasses not only geographic space, but also social, political, and psychological terrains. Working across photography, performance, and moving image, I approach each project through interdisciplinary frameworks that include cultural theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and critical theory. Through my work, landscape functions as a site for examining and reconfiguring collective memory, trauma, and ethical responsibility.
My current research investigates the proposition that collective trauma may be transmitted across generations through epigenetic mechanisms, and that such trauma may also be mitigated—or potentially transformed—through intentional acts of movement, gesture, and ritual. This inquiry emerges from a broader engagement with scholarship on inherited trauma and embodied memory, particularly as it relates to histories of racialized violence and displacement.
A foundational influence on this line of inquiry is Joy DeGruy’s Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome, which argues that the systemic trauma experienced by enslaved Africans in early American history continues to manifest in social, psychological, and relational patterns within African American communities today. DeGruy further suggests that these patterns may be linked to biological inheritance, positioning trauma not only as a cultural phenomenon but also as a material one, encoded within the body.
As an American artist whose ancestry includes enslaved people, I approach this history as both collective and personal. I ask how artistic practice might function as an intervention—specifically, whether it is possible to interrupt the transmission of inherited trauma through embodied action. This question led me to epigenetic research by Sailani, Calling, Møller, and others, whose 2019 study demonstrated that gene expression can be altered through physical activity.
This research forms the basis of my ongoing project Exercism, a series of performative self-portraits in which I use the body as both subject and site of inquiry. Through carefully selected movements and gestures, the work attempts to confront and recalibrate inherited trauma at the level of biological expression. Photography operates here not as passive documentation, but as an active mechanism—recording, mediating, and potentially reauthoring the relationship between history, body, and memory.
In parallel with my studio practice, my scholarly research examines the ontological and psychological dimensions of photography. My recent paper, Photography as a Mechanism of Dream Transference, argues that photographs may be understood as visual records of dreams—sites where unconscious material is displaced, preserved, and transmitted. The paper has been cited more than 29 times to date, reflecting sustained engagement with its central proposition across interdisciplinary fields.
Together, my creative and scholarly research positions photography as an epistemological tool—one capable of addressing inherited trauma, unconscious transmission, and the ethics of historical memory through both image-making and embodied practice.