I’m an art historian of the Iberian colonial world, with a focus on the Black Atlantic. I am interested in the ways in which Afro-descendant individuals created and deployed vernacular visual, material, and expressive cultures to construct their social and political authority.

My dissertation examines the development of African-derived ritual drawing in nineteenth-century Cuba. I focus on the drawings of individuals who identified as Carabalí, an ethnonym given to enslaved Africans trafficked from the port of Calabar in what is today southeastern Nigeria. Drawing on extensive archival research, I propose that African and European bureaucratic visual cultures mutually informed each other to create a aesthetic space where power was constantly created and contested. My research analyzes text and image together as entangled subjects of art historical inquiry in order to shift the way in which we understand African diasporic ritual practice across the Atlantic world.

I earned my Ph.D. in History of Art from Yale University in May 2025. I am currently Assistant Professor of African and Latin American art at the University of Kentucky, in Lexington, KY.

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