Art and design serve as (1) a connective activity that occupies our hands as we tell stories to eachother, (2) a reflective practice that fires synapses in new ways for new understanding, even of old problems, and (3) a complex communication tool, to think through and be with the thorny problems of AI vs. environments. My theory-based art and design practice is rooted in the cultural production of intersectional feminist activists and anarchopunk histories largely based in the US, transnational works by queer ecology theorists and naturalists, the generosity of indigenous thought leaders that share nature-led ways of knowing, and the community-led methods of the feminist science lab, feminist technoscience and art-science lineages.

The following are select examples of designs and design thinking (largely in collaboration with others) of the justice-oriented and community-engaged art-science that defines my recent work.

ART OF ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE | HYDRO PARK COMMUNITY ART SERIES (2026)

As the inaugural Ethnographer-in-Residence at the University of Michigan’s Center for Ethics, Society and Computing, we gather the community labeled as a “sacrifice zone” where a classified national security data center for nuclear bomb simulation and modeling is proposed to be built. Through large public community art parties full of sun, water, free food, free games and free activities, we gather residents, non-profits, scientists, policymakers, artists, poets, farmers, service workers, emergency responders, parents, caretakers, technologists, parks workers, and many other walks of life to be in conversation together expressing themselves in stories and in art-making. These practices use river water, wind, foraged materials and the hands of locals to produce 100s of artworks that will be exhibited in a large-scale installation as a testament to the community’s resilience and resistance.

ETHNOGRAPHICALLY-INFORMED ARTWORK | NEWARK WETLANDS (2025)

In support of visionary artist Amanda Thackray, these public artworks were informed by interviews and ethnographic insights from 3-years of engagement via art-science gatherings around the toxic superfund sites of the Passaic River and Newark riverfront.

PLACE-BASED ARTWORK | CURRENTS (2024)

These art-science workshops at the waterfront leveraged different artistic practices to either metaphorically invoke the river or were functionally possible because of the river and what is found in its watershed.

COMMUNITY-LED DESIGN | RIPARIAN CHORUS ZINE (2026)

In collaboration with visionary artist Amanda Thackray, funded in part by the EPA through the Hudson River Foundation artist-in-residence for the Passaic River, this zine reflects one piece of a 3-year engagement around the toxic superfund sites in and around Newark, NJ. This document is a community desire for a touchstone, something to refer to and gather around, that represents their pride, concern and questions around the toxic watershed that feeds their family gardens and precipitates into the air they breathe daily. Risograph, editioned to 1000, translated in Spanish here, forthcoming Portuguese.

ART AS REFLECTIVE TOOL | STRUCTURE & FLUIDITY (2021)

This black and white pencil drawing, digitally rendered for maximum contrast, is an isolated moment in a series of digital artworks and freeform “hundreds” writings about the ways in which nature will always reconstitute itself in the face of a colonizing mechanical man-made object and the ways in which colonizing mechanical man-made objects are constituted by harvesting and repurposing natural geometries. An excerpt:

A DuckDuckGo search for “glass sea sponge” results in Ernst Haeckel. Suddenly, the writings of Sabrina Imbler swirl: of Haeckel’s violent evolutionary racism, eugenic desires for purity, the profound beauty of these images, the symbolism of the glass sea sponge as everlasting heteromonogamous love, the profoundly queer observed existence of this species. Water itself is a miscellaneous category, a diversity, contaminant as much as lifegiving, contained as much as chaotic, sacred as much as mundane. I am reminded of Stefan Helmreich’s work, “waves” of feminism, theoretical flows, currents, circulations, oceanization—metaphors where water helps us make sense of ourselves.