Research

My writing extends my research on cultural spaces and embodiment, through a Black feminist lens, with attention to how race, gender, and class structure aesthetic life and everyday experience. Across scholarly and public-facing work, I am interested in how social worlds are read, felt, negoitated, and interpreted through the body.

My work often moves between academic and public sociology, drawing on ethnography, interviews, cultural theory, and close observation to examine how meaning is produced within spaces of leisure, performance, and visual culture.

In Black Skin, Pink Tights: The Experience of Black Dancers in Ballet (under contract with NYU Press), I examine the experiences of Black women in ballet, a historically white institution structured through ideals of purity, discipline and rigor, and most importantly, aesthetic control. While Black dancers often navigate shared forms of marginalization, Black women encounter distinct formations of racialized and gendered visibility that shape how their bodies are disciplined and interpreted within the form.

The study traces how Black women negotiate identity within this contradiction, with a central focus on how these conditions produce forms of racial fatigue.

Alongside this book project, I have published work on whiteness and racial navigation in art spaces, as well as gendered experience within workplace environments.

I have also curated visual sociology through a virtual art exhibit.

Across these works, I return to questions of how power operates through culture, and how it is made legible in everyday life.