My professional journey has led me to work in college classrooms, national museums, grassroots organizations, international development, and public policy. Across these communities, I have dedicated my work to advance social justice in contexts ranging from conflict resolution and reparations to climate change and museum exhibits.

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​I am currently the Director of the Center of Restorative History (CRH) within the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History. The CRH is built on a commitment to collaborate with communities that have been historically harmed and excluded from national narratives. With a focus on redress, we advance a theory and method for re-imagining public history as a tool for social justice. Prior to joining the CRH, I was an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Science & Technology Policy Fellow at the US Agency for International Development, serving as a Gender Technical Advisor for Environment & Climate, and a 2021 American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Leading Edge Fellow at NMAH, working with the Division of Medicine & Science and the Center for Restorative History.

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My research analyzes the relationship between reparations, redress, and the politics of visibility. I am especially interested in the role of memory, narrative, performance, and embodiment in the socio-political construction of victimhood at the state and community level. My doctoral work focused on Colombia, where the government is trying to end over 60 years of internal armed conflict. This work analyzed the way Afro-Colombian rural residents make themselves visible (visibilizarse) in order to gain state recognition as victims while also highlighting broader ethnic, gendered, classed, and environmental inequalities that have historically affected their communities.

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I bring my research expertise to the classroom, where I have taught upper- and introductory-level undergraduate courses on topics that range from Latin American Politics and Culture to cross-cultural analyses of Culture and Power. My dissertation, "Critical Visibility in Colombia: victimhood, reparations and the challenge of visibilizarse" was awarded the best PhD thesis by the Asociación de Colombianistas in 2019, and I have published in peer-reviewed journals in Spanish and English. Additionally, I am committed to communicating my research findings more broadly, including through testimonies to support victims’ legal cases, reports to influence government policies, and mixed media exhibits.