For nearly a decade, I have collaborated with the Mẽbêngôkre-Kayapó community of A’Ukre in Brazil’s Amazon/Cerrado region, supporting community-led research, monitoring, and knowledge-mobilization projects. This work includes co-directing an ethnographic field course and developing public-facing deliverables, grounded in community protocols and Indigenous data sovereignty. I earned my PhD in Anthropology from the University of Maryland (UMD) in 2025. This research examined how Indigenous women enact relational governance and how gendered responsibilities, material care, and ecological stewardship produce political authority from local lifeworlds to international policy forums.

My Master’s degree in Applied Anthropology from the University of Maryland focused on how cultural landscape management, more specifically the cultural burning practices of Indigenous groups, like the Mẽbêngôkre-Kayapó, are affected by natural disasters like drought, and the effect these practices have on biodiversity of the Brazilian Cerrado. My graduate work at UMD was supported by the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship.

I also hold a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology and Geography from Arizona State University. As an undergraduate, I joined the Culture, Health, and Environment Lab (Drs. Amber Wutich and Alexandra Brewis), where I built a broad qualitative methods skillset through the Global Ethnohydrology Study (text analysis, qualitative coding, data collection/management) and later collaborated with Dr. Wutich on a content-analysis project examining development professionals’ perspectives on participation in Bolivia. I also worked in Dr. Michael E. Smith’s Mesoamerican Archaeology Lab, using quantitative methods to measure wealth inequality in Postclassic Central Mexican Nahuatl communities and translating Spanish Colonial wills and other testaments to track inflation across the peso, real, and Aztec currencies (e.g., cacao).

I am currently based in Phoenix, AZ.