My work investigates how affective processes provoked by aesthetic experience can shape, and be shaped by, the intersubjective, cross-cultural encounter. I work with video, sound, installation, and performance, and employ a strategic poetics of the image and representation to shape environments for encounter and engagement between strangers. In designing mediated spaces of engagement, I question how subject positions orientated by race, ethnicity, citizenship, education, and class can realign within the self in dialogical relation to another. I am interested in the recursive feedback between acts of viewing, performing, and uttering the self and the constitution of one’s way of being (in-relation) in the world; and in this process, how we recognize and cultivate our sense of belonging to a public.

From 2009-2010 I lived in Seoul, South Korea on a Fulbright Fellowship in the field of Performance Art. My research investigated the Korean psyche and national identity as they are negotiated and embodied through the traditional performing arts. Additional research focused on contemporary Korean video art and representations of modern history and collective memory. Since 2003 I have been a collaborator with Open University, a transdisciplinary multimedia collective and alternative education project, founded in Brooklyn, New York. OU hosts and designs public events and situations that address contemporary culture and social issues.

I am currently producing a site-specific project in Queens, New York about immigrant youth, rights to the city, cosmopolitical hospitality, and civic participation.