I am a third-year PhD student at the University of Rochester studying the history of photography with a focus on documentary photography in the United States, vernacular photography in the Middle East, photographic archives, and photography of migration. I studied at NYU Abu Dhabi during my undergraduate career and focused on issues of migrant labor and workers' rights there, especially in my documentary photography work.
My work with photography includes a summer-long internship in 2019 with The National, a UAE national newspaper, working as a photojournalist intern with select work published, and my portfolio shown here. That year, I also undertook a documentary project on Filipino migrant workers in the UAE and the spaces they inhabit despite the UAE's oppressive qualities in their urban planning and approach to laborer's rights.
Additionally, I was the chief photography editor (and contributing writer) of NYUAD's newspaper, The Gazelle, for two semesters. You can read and see my work here. While at NYUAD, I additionally worked at the NYUAD Arts Center as a photographer for the visual arts department. I was paid to photograph show openings and classroom activities for the department. I also put on my own solo show with over 200 images on display from my time photographing in the United States, mostly in the South.
I worked for the Akkasah Center for Photography, and continue to support the archive as an independent contractor. I have worked on collections ranging from Syria to the UAE to Palestine, and have experience handling 19th to 21st century photographic objects and prints. I worked as an intern at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the summer of 2023, where I cataloged a collection if 19th century work by Charles DeForest Fredricks, handled contemporary prints, and worked in the archive of Japanese photobooks.
I am currently curating three shows relating to the history of vernacular photography and portraiture for the University of Rochester, using a collection of 10,000 images owned by Professor Nigel Maister. My photobook "A Politics of Concealment: Sex Work and Labor in the UAE" will be shown at the University of Rochester Sex/Labor exhibit in November 2024. Further, I am displaying my work with a colleague in my PhD program, Renee Jin, at a campus exhibition space in Spring 2025, with a focus on trash and photography's relationship to eco-criticsm.
I continue to write on photography in the capacity of its use as a Pro-Palestinian tool of resistance, as well as the Farm Security Administration's infrastructural projects bolstered by photographers such as Dorothea Lange. Currently, my practice is shifting in an art photography direction, with interest in the construction of photobooks and returning to the Gulf as an ethnographic field site.
