About
I am an art historian interested in late medieval and early modern Italian art and visual culture, with a critical methodology shaped by queer feminist and posthumanist theory. My research is rooted in the belief that history is not a linear process; rather, it is a layered terrain where past and present continuously inform each other. I approach the early modern period through (post)modern frameworks, embracing anachronism and afterlives as generative tools for inquiry.
My MA thesis employs a historiographic lens to explore early modern Italian art and visual culture through the figure of St. John the Baptist and the genre of the male nude as an intermediary between body and spirit. This project reexamines the entanglement of body, environment, and theology in the visual imagination of the Renaissance and Baroque eras. Central to this inquiry is Caravaggio’s St. John the Baptist cycle, situated in relation to Post-Tridentine Roman ecclesiastical concerns and the writings of Gabriele Paleotti and Gian Paolo Lomazzo. Through this case study, I interrogate the intersections of queer embodiment, visual ecology, and sacred representation.
I am co-founder of The Queer Ecologies Research Collective, an interdisciplinary initiative that brings together artists, scholars, poets, and other creatives to investigate the common ground between queer theory and ecological thought. My contributions focus on the visual history of nature and landscape as a genre, tracing continuities from the early modern period to contemporary visual culture. Projects include a peer-reviewed article in Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, a screening at New Ear in New York, and ongoing residencies at Mildred’s Lane (2023–2025).
I will join a PhD program in 2026 to develop my project Queering Arcadia—a critical reexamination of nudity and landscape as emergent genres in Renaissance and Baroque Italy. This work interrogates the microcosm/macrocosm cosmology of the early modern period in order to frame its continued relevance in our current age of ecological collapse. At its core, my scholarship is driven by the conviction that historical visual culture can help us imagine new futures.
My creative and artistic impulses are expressed through my collaborations with other artists, writers, and scholars. You can see more in my Projects.
I am guided by these words:
To be an astronaut of the void, leave the comfortable
house that imprisons you with reassurance.
Remember,
To be going and to have are not eternal – fight the fear
that engenders the beginning, the middle, and the end.
Derek Jarman, Blue, 1993