I am an environmental anthropologist. My work is about how people relate to land, kin, and more-than-human worlds, and how these relationships influence the way communities are governed.

For almost ten years, I have worked alongside the Mẽbêngôkre-Kayapó community of A’Ukre in Brazil’s Amazon and Cerrado region. My work there includes research, teaching, field courses, and collaborative projects, all rooted in long-term relationships and a commitment to accountability.

My approach reflects these relationships and my position as an outsider. I treat research as an ongoing process of accountability, with questions, methods, and outcomes shaped through conversation with community partners. I pay close attention to power, access, and representation, supporting projects prioritized by collaborators and working to avoid extractive approaches.

I earned my PhD in Anthropology from the University of Maryland in 2025. My dissertation examines how Mẽbêngôkre-Kayapó women enact what I call relational governance, showing how political authority is grounded in gendered responsibilities, ecological stewardship, and everyday forms of care that extend into community and policy spaces. My graduate work at UMD was supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.

My earlier work focused on cultural burning in the Brazilian Cerrado and how these practices shape biodiversity and respond to environmental change. This led to a broader interest in how fire, landscape, and governance are connected across scales, from village life to policy.

My relationship with A’Ukre began through an ethnographic field course. After first attending as an undergraduate student in 2014, I later returned to help co-direct and coordinate the program across multiple years, bringing students into community and research settings to learn how conservation, governance, and livelihoods are shaped in practice. I have also built on this work through The A’Ukre Project, a long-term partnership that supports research, education, and community collaboration.

I earned my BA in Anthropology, with a minor in Geography, from Arizona State University. As an undergraduate, I trained in qualitative methods with the Culture, Health, and Environment Lab and in archaeological data analysis with the Calixtlahuaca Archaeological Project.

In a previous life, I worked in concert promotion and venue management. That experience still shapes how I work. It taught me how to coordinate complex logistics, manage competing priorities, communicate across very different groups of people, and keep things moving when conditions are unpredictable. Those skills translate directly into fieldwork, collaborative research, and running programs like the Brazil field course.

I publish academic research, but I also care about forms of communication that are useful beyond universities. This includes community reports, policy-relevant writing, field-based learning, and conversations that make research legible across cultural, institutional, and political contexts. I often find myself working in the middle, helping translate between academic language, community priorities, conservation practice, and policy frameworks while recognizing that each has its own perspective.

I am currently living in Phoenix, Arizona, where everyday family life is much less structured than my research.