I first wandered into the WGS Department as a freshman and my decision to enroll in a seminar entitled, "Race, Gender, and Criminality," was one of the most influential decisions I made during my first year on campus. That seminar challenged so many of the assumptions I had made about myself and the world and shifted my understanding of institutions and power.

When I returned to campus as a sophomore, I decided to pursue a Joint Concentration in Government and WGS with a secondary in Ethnicity, Migration, Rights. Although WGS was not my primary field, I tried to immerse myself in the department and its affiliated courses. Few other departments on campus centered an analysis of race, gender, sexuality, and class when discussing topics related to politics and borders.

Years later, I began to research how different presentations of gender and sexuality affected the case outcomes of individuals applying for asylum in the US. I was specifically investigating cases involving LGBTQ individuals who applied for asylum on the grounds that they were victims of past persecution or feared future persecution due to their membership in a particular social group in their country of origin.

The WGS department embraced my interdisciplinary approach to this research and encouraged me to collect my own data since the US government had never documented the case outcomes of queer asylum seekers in any formal way. After using resources provided by Duke Law School and Harvard Law, I was able to create an original data set of US Circuit Court cases involving LGBTQ applicants from 1995 to 2017 and interview several immigration lawyers and advocates about their work. This research culminated in the form of my senior thesis entitled, "(In)visibly Queer: Assessing Disparities in the Adjudication of U.S. LGBTQ Asylum Cases."

After graduating from Harvard in 2018, I received a fellowship to continue my academic studies at the University of Cambridge. There, I completed an MA degree in the Sociology of Marginality and Exclusion. Having arrived in the UK shortly after the Windrush Crisis or "scandal" occurred, I felt moved to explore the lived experiences of Black immigrants in England. My dissertation questioned how diasporic subjects make homes in hostile environments and integrated an analysis of immigration law, archival material, and ethnographic work. I am still working on a documentary related to this research entitled, By the Root (to be released in 2023).

In 2020, I left London and returned to New York to dedicate myself to building a career in the arts. I am an artist who works in performance, installation, and video and my conceptual work centers the body as a living archive. I mainly use performance to question the limits of the category of “woman” and particularly focus on the liminal position of Black women, who are readily identified as being spectacular figures: either sub-human, superhuman, or machine. Each performance that I engage in allows these explorations to occur at the site of my own body and is inspired by my attempts to reckon with my estranged relationship to my gendered and racialized queer self.

Last year, I concluded my first independent performance series entitled Graft, which attempted to capture the violence that constructions of whiteness and femininity wrought on Black bodies. I have exhibited works from that series at venues and galleries across New York and am currently an artist-in-residence at the New York Artist Residency Studios (NARS) where I am developing a new performance. You can follow my work and performances here.

WGS gave me the language and tools I needed to become a more thoughtful researcher and artist. I can absolutely say that I would not be able to create the works I am making today without the foundation I received from the department.