Towards a Culture of
Belonging
― bell hooks, Belonging: A Culture of Place
I did not come to research because I wanted answers. I came because there were things I couldn’t stop noticing—histories that pressed against my body before I had the language to hold them. Archives felt less like repositories and more like rooms with missing furniture. What I study followed me long before I chose it: across classrooms and streets, across kitchens, murals, and conversations where memory was passed hand to hand, often without permission.
My research is a practice of listening—to places shaped by colonial violence, to visual cultures rooted in collective care, to knowledge dismissed as informal, emotional, or excessive. I am interested in how art, particularly public and diasporic practices, makes place where none was meant to exist. My work refuses the idea that history is settled or neutral. It asks instead who has been asked to carry it, who has been written out of it, and what survives anyway.
Making is how I stay close to what scholarship cannot always hold. Through material, repetition, slowness, and improvisation, my artistic practice becomes another way of thinking—one that allows memory to move without being fully named. Art is where I work through what lingers, what resists clarity, what refuses to behave.
Teaching is where these ways of knowing meet. I approach the classroom as a shared site of inquiry, care, and unlearning—where students are invited to question authority, sit with contradiction, and recognize their lived experiences as knowledge. For me, pedagogy is a practice of freedom: a commitment to making space, building tables, and refusing inherited limits on who gets to speak, remember, and imagine otherwise.
I am becoming a person accountable to my communities, my students, and the histories that keep insisting on being heard.
To let go of
those titles—
those borders.
To just be.
- I’m a manifesto manifested.
Cada respiro—herencia.
- Cada paso-resistencia.
La sangre arde como fuego,
- tambores de memoria en mi pecho,
ritmos más viejos que las cadenas, - más fuertes que el silencio....
Pictures from my personal archive
EDUCATION
Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL (FSU). Ph.D., Art History.
May 2027
Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL (FSU). M. A., Art History.
May 2021
Georgia Southern University, Statesboro, GA (GSU). BA, Art History. Cum Laude. May 2019
FELLOWSHIPS & AWARDS
- Mason Research Award 2024
- Beard Travel Award 2024/2025
- Winbury Writing Award 2024
- Leslie N. Wilson-Delores Auzenne Assistantship Fellow 2019–2021
- AfroJuventudes Anti-Racist Fellow 2019–2020
ART EXHIBITIONS
Place-Within: Diasporic Belonging and Relational Memory, William Johnston Gallery, Florida State University, January–February 2026 (Co-Curator).
Corrientes de deriva litoral, Teatro LATEA @ The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Educational Center (107 Suffolk St. New York, NY)
Corrientes de deriva litoral, Teatro LATEA @ The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Educational Center (107 Suffolk St. New York, NY)
PUBLICATIONS
“Las Nietas de Nonó: Ilustraciones de la Mecánica and Spaces of Refusal,” in Colonial Racial Capitalism, edited by Kency Cornejo. USLAF, X as Intersection: Writing on Latinx Art (Executive Editor). (Fall 2026.)
“The Basse—a Ghost Engine: Tevin Lewis and the Mythic Systems of Becoming” in Burnaway Magazine. (Summer 2025)
“Boundaries of Belonging: Reclaiming Place through Memory and Architecture” in Center for Puerto Rican Studies - Writings on Diasporican Visual Artists. (Spring 2025)
“Echoes of Identity: Afro-Puerto Rican Women and the Creole House” in Intervenxions: the Latinx Project (Winter 2023
“Recolectando la Semilla: The Creole House and the Negotiation of Memory, Space, and Race in Ponce, Puerto Rico” in Ampersand: An American Studies Journal (Summer 2023)
TEACHING EXPERIENCE
- Instructor of Record, Florida State University (FSU), Art History Department, Taught History and Criticism of Art, Spring 2026 – Section 001
- Instructor of Record, Florida State University (FSU), Art History Department, Taught History and Criticism of Art, Spring 2026 – Section 002
- Instructor of Record, Florida State University (FSU), Art History Department, Taught History and Criticism of Art, Fall 2025 – Section 001
- Instructor of Record, Florida State University (FSU), Art History Department, Taught History and Criticism of Art, Fall 2025 – Section 003
- Instructor of Record, Florida State University (FSU), Art History Department, Taught Art Appreciation, Summer 2025
- Instructor of Record, Florida State University (FSU), Art History Department, Taught History and Criticism of Art, Spring 2025
- Teaching Assistant, Florida State University (FSU), Art History Department, worked under Dr. Tenley Bick, assisted Intro to Modern and Contemporary Art, Fall 2024
ACADEMIC EXPERIENCE
- Guest Lecturer, Historia del Muralismo Puertorriqueño, Mueso de Arte de Puerto Rico, San Juan, Puerto Rico, May 2025
- Peer Reviewer, Athanor, vol. XLI, Florida State University (FSU), Art History Department, Summer-Fall 2024/2025
- Historians of Puerto Rico Working Group, Hybrid/Remote, Rutgers-New Brunswick, School of Arts and Sciences, 2024 - Present
- Graduate Assistant for the Re-development of the Museum and Cultural Heritage Program, Florida State University (FSU), Art History Department, Summer 2024
- Founder and Coordinator, Art History Connections Mentorship Program, 2021
- Member of the Anti-Racist and Equality Committee, Florida State University (FSU), Art History Department, 2021
CONFERENCES
“Race, Place, and Identity: Colonial Narratives in Puerto Rican Street Art.” CAA 114th Annual Conference, Chicago, February 2026.
“Pressing Memory, Ironing Histories: Black Women’s Labor and Refusal in Damaris Cruz’s Las Planchadoras (2014).” Presented at The Latinx Project’s Graduate Student Working Group Symposium: Perspectives on Aesthetics, Sexuality, and Geography, New York University, New York City, United States. March 2025
“Ancestral Landscapes Labs: Ancestral Landscapes Lab (ALL): Tracing Afro Puerto Rican Experiences through Memory and Place.” Presented at the Homo Sargassum International Symposium, Museum of Fine Arts Florida State University, Florida, United States. March 2025.
“Resurgence of Puerto Rican Creole Architecture: Reviving Memories and Redefining Identities with Casa Borges,” Presented at the 2024 SESAH – Conference. In panel: Vernacular Designs and Places. Marietta, United States. October 2024
“Voices in Color: Damaris Cruz, Street Art, and the Reclamation of Afro-Puerto Rican Identity,” Presented at the 2024 AAH – Conference. In panel: Shifting Grounds: Landscape and Cultural Practice in Latin America. Bristol, United Kingdom. April 2024
Towards a Practice
From A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce, 1916.
As a child, I had to leave my home in Puerto Rico. Thinking I was entering a world of abundance and prosperity, I was met with a space of imagination. Reality was fragmented, and the lines between nightmares and dreams blurred. My artwork responds to that fragmented reality, bringing forward questions like: “Who am I? Where am I from? What is home?” and “Where is belonging?” Using childlike drawings with traditional forms found in the Caribbean, I take these estranged pieces, those fragments that are familiar yet obscured, to speak to a reality many children of diaspora feel.
My practice grapples with the daily struggles of longing for place, holding heavy, challenging emotions related to feelings of loss and displacement. A lot about the limitations that a system, a colonial imposition, holds on us from returning or even being partially at home. I think a lot about that child who had to leave home, and I give her a place to be heard from both the space of the colonized and the colonizer. Filled with deep sadness and immense rage, that child’s imagination is visualized with vibrant colors yet disturbing imagery.
Often featuring the pink wooden house of my great-grandmother, Carmen Antonetti, my paintings consider the construction of place and home. They consider the ancestral foundations, not the nostalgic visions. Masked female figures are accompanied by doodles reminiscent of vejigantes and tropical Edens, icons of Caribbean popular culture. I take inspiration from Puerto Rican print media and Haitian Voodoo flags to speak to that sense of distance and the displacement I, like many others, have experienced.
My creative process involves mixing sophisticated mediums, like oil paints, with children’s art supplies, such as magic markers, crayons, and inexpensive colored pencils. This method emphasizes the survival tactic of maturing while still being a child to highlight the disorienting and disturbing truth of being away from one’s home. Even though she had to leave and has barely returned, that child’s reality echoes through these paintings. Her imagination, filled with fragments and ghosts, constructed an idea place. Overall, what is our imagination but a version of home?