I’m an art historian and postdoctoral fellow currently based at the High Meadows Environmental Institute at Princeton University. I received my Ph.D. in 2023 from the University of California, Berkeley, where my research on global modernisms converged around issues of race, imperialism, and the environment in the arts of Europe and the Americas. I have worked on diverse projects surrounding the racial politics of ornament, the labor of nude modeling, and the lives of commissioned portraiture, with geographical focuses that span Europe, the United States, and Latin America.

My book, tentatively entitled Substrate: Mexican Minerals and Greater American Modernism, is forthcoming with Duke University Press. While art historians typically understand American modernism as a response to U.S. industrial modernity, Substrate turns our attention to the paradigms of American modernism that were shaped by the Mexican minerals that sustained that modernity. In 2025, the dissertation on which this book was based—Mineral Modernism: The Mexican Subsoil and the Remapping of American Form in the 1930s won the Zuckerman Prize for the best dissertation in art, literature, and American Studies, which is awarded annually by the McNeill Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

Portions of this manuscript were published as “Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry and the Subterranean Commons,” in the March 2025 issue of The Art Bulletin.

My research has been supported by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, UC Berkeley’s Center for Latin American Studies, and the Fulbright program for US scholars. My writing has been published in The Archives of American Art Journal, The Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, and the edited volume Historical Narratives of Modern Art (Routledge, 2023).

Prior to my Ph.D., I spent 2015-2016 in Berlin, Germany on a fellowship supported by the Fulbright commission, to study the ways nineteenth-century museum display strategies were informed by nascent theories of both modernist formalism and citizenship. In addition to my professional experience teaching and researching, I have held positions at the de Young Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the National Gallery of Art. I received my B.A. from Wesleyan University in 2014.