I am a transdisciplinary scholar, curator, educator, and memory worker committed to exploring the intersections of media, technology, and cultural memory through both critical and creative practice. Grounded in the belief that archives are not static repositories for storage but dynamic, living sites of resistance, rupture, relationality, and reconciliation, my work treats them as spaces that demand active engagement to facilitate justice and foster emotional, social, and cultural healing. I center multimodal storytelling as a transformative method for reclaiming histories, disrupting erasure, and generating new forms of knowledge.

I approach archives not as static repositories, but as living, breathing spaces where memory, relationship, and transformation unfold. Through storytelling, workshops, and hands-on preservation, I work alongside communities and individuals to reclaim histories that have often been overlooked or erased.

I currently serve as a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Latin American and Latino Studies at UC Santa Cruz. I’m the founder of the Latina Media Recovery Project and co-founder of the ImaginX en Movimiento (IXeM) Memory Collective. Each of these projects creates space for community-led preservation through DIY/T tools, shared resources, and culturally grounded practices. I am also a board member for the Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center, a community space dedicated to supporting underrepresented stories through independent media and the arts, and Royal Eagle Bear Productions, a film production company founded by pioneer queer Chicana filmmaker, Osa Hidalgo de la Riva.

As a film curator and programmer, I’ve collaborated with organizations such as the Latin American Cinemateca of Los Angeles, MIX NYC, the Watsonville Film Festival, and the Vincent Price Art Museum to advocate for the self-representation of diverse Latinx/é and Latin American creators.

My research and writing have been featured in journals such as Feminist Media Histories, The International Journal of Information, Diversity & Inclusion, and Interdisciplinary Digital Engagement in Arts & Humanities. My book-in-progress is a self-reflexive exploration of feminist and relational archival praxis grounded in the film archive and cultural legacy of queer Chicana filmmaker Osa Hidalgo de la Riva.

I identify as a mixed-race Latina of white settler, Mexican, Indigenous Rarámuri, and Arab ancestry. I was born in Los Angeles (Tovaangar) and moved with my family to the Santa Cruz area (Aptos Ohlone lands) at the age of seven. After high school, I moved to San Francisco (Yelamu Ohlone lands) and later returned to Los Angeles/Tovaangar in my early twenties to continue my education as a transfer student at UCLA, where I earned a B.A. in Middle Eastern and North African Studies. I then moved to New York City to pursue an M.A. in Cinema Studies at New York University, and again returned to Los Angeles for a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies from Claremont Graduate University.

While in the early stages of writing my dissertation, I was recruited for a postdoctoral fellowship in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, completing a second year of postdoctoral work in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies. During my time in Urbana-Champaign (Peoria, Kaskaskia, Peankashaw, Wea, Miami, Mascoutin, Odawa, Sauk, Mesquaki, Kickapoo, Potawatomi, Ojibwe, and Chickasaw lands), I founded the Memory Lab at the Urbana Makerspace, a community space for both traditional digital preservation and creative engagement with personal and community archives, served on the board of the Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center, and even picked up clawhammer banjo and contra dance. I plan to continue my justice-driven scholarship, teaching, curatorial work, archival practice, and creative endeavors in the California Bay Area/Ohlone lands.