I am a Chicago-based anthropologist working with ethnography, performance, and artmaking to expand awareness of people’s creative efforts to deal with the aftermath of harm and to craft hopeful futures.

From coffee cultures to public memorials, my work spans kitchen cupboards, urban gardens, and city streets to record how people make meaning in their daily lives. I believe we all have stories to tell and I love learning from and working with people whose experiences have yet to be widely understood..

My fieldwork experience includes a focus on food, urban place-making, and wellbeing in Chicago’s north side refugee corridor, post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina, and post-Katrina New Orleans.

I have a Ph.D. in Anthropology and a certificate in Gender Studies from Northwestern University, and I’ve held academic appointments at Mount Holyoke College, Loyola University Chicago, and the University of New Orleans, and I work as a consultant with museums & arts organizations, and partner with artists & academics.

I’m a girl from the middle: I have great affection for the Mississippi River (I was born at its head and lived for some years at its mouth) but my heart is at the southern tip of its longtime sister, Lake Michigan, in metro-Chicago, where I grew up and raised my now-adult son.