At MCN 2020 I had the opportunity to present my thoughts on actions we could take to curb the exploitation of our data privacy and the impact of persuasive technology. I presented my thoughts within a framework I got from the MASS Action Toolkit—Awareness, Acceptance, and Action. I suggested following this framework so that any action we take is grounded in the root issues of the problems we’re addressing, with the hope that our action will be sustained long into the future.
I'm the Director of Engineering at a museum in Chicago as well as a facilitator, educator, and community builder. My experience planning and executing complex web projects has also brought me to work with institutions to create concrete plans around the healing and accountability from historic traumas like colonialism, slavery, genocide, and war. I'm a regular contributor at The Incluseum and is a project advisor for MASS Action. My writing has been featured in the Journal for Museum Education, Fwd: Museums, and Model View Culture.
Visitors of Color
In addition to the above video, you may know me by my work as co-creator of the Visitors of Color blog, where we document the experiences of people from marginalized communities who visit—and don't visit—museums.
Check it out on Tumblr
Oppression: A Museum Primer
You might also know me by an article I wrote titled Oppression: a museum primer where I define and discuss how to recognize and dismantle oppression. Over the years, it has become a fundamental article in museum activist spaces.
Check it out on The Incluseum
Recent Projects
Immigration, the Civil Rights Movement, and my existence
August 2020For the Art Institute blog, I wrote an article linking immigration, the Civil Rights Movement, and art created at the time by Black artists through my parents’ immigration stories. It was a way to ground the Black uprisings this summer in a long history of organizing in response to racial violence, and it was also a sweet way for me to document my parents’ stories as their memories are getting fuzzy.
Check it out on artic.edu
Uncovering white supremacy culture in museum work
March 2020Along with a few museum friends Hannah Heller and Joanne Jones-Rizzi, I wrote an article describing the ways white supremacy culture operates in museums. Drawing from Kenneth Jones and Tema Okun’s work that names the cultural attributes of White supremacy in organizations, we took a few of the characteristics that resonated strongly in our work as educators and community builders and unpacked what they specifically look like in museums and what their impacts are.
Check it out on The Incluseum
Data Hub at the Art Institute of Chicago
November 2019As part of the artic.edu website redesign, we created a central data repository for all of our public content that can feed the website, our mobile apps, in-gallery interactives, and an eventual public API. Our Data Hub collects all our public data in one place, serve it all up through a uniform API, and make the content collected from all our platforms searchable in a single place. Watch a talk I gave about the project at MCN 2019.
Check it out on YouTube
Intersecting Agile and the Antidotes to White Supremacy Culture
November 2019I organized a conference panel discussion along with a few colleagues from the Minneapolis Institute of Art exploring how Scrum—an established framework for addressing complex adaptive problems across industries— could be applied to counteract white supremacy culture in our organizations. We had a really rich discussion and got a lot of great feedback. For confidentiality, we didn’t record the session, but you can check out some live tweets that were made during the session here.
Check it out
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Awards and Honors
Gender Equality Award, United Nations Women
2016
Education & Training Volunteer of the Year, Rape Victim Advocates
2016
Jeff Citation Award, Original Incidental Music
2006Recent Blog Articles
2020
2017
MCN is one of two museum technology conferences that happen annually. While there are many talks and conversations diving deep into technical topics, the conference is most known for its threads on organizational culture and social transformation. Following are some of my major takeaways.
Following is a short talk that I gave at the Facilitated Conversation About Inclusion and Equity in Conservation and Preservation that took place before the American Institute for Conservation conference in May 2017. Afterwards are some details of the event.
2016
To the tune of “wheels on the bus:”
2015
Last night I gave an Ignite talk at MCN 2015 in Minneapolis about museums and oppression. An Ignite talk is a 5-minute presentation with 20 slides that advance automatically every 15 seconds. I fit a lot in there, so I thought it might be useful for folks at the conference to refer back to what I said. Below is a video, my slides, and the text from my talk, entitled Towards an Anti-Oppression Museum Manifesto:
Thoughts on how the board game Catan replicates early U.S. treatment of indigenous and black people for Indigenous People’s Day:
Several months ago, I wrote an article for the Incluseum blog breaking down ideas of oppression for the museum community: Oppression: A Museum Primer. Here’s an excerpt:
2014
There’ve been discussions among museum professionals questioning if and how our institutions should participate in the movements that have arisen from Ferguson in some way. As I’m sure many people in the conversation have been, I’ve been extremely affected by the recent decisions to not indict law enforcement in the killings of unarmed black people, and these recent injustices have occupied my mind a great deal in recent weeks. I recognize that these decisions are part of a history of the state murdering black people with impunity that goes back hundreds of years. I also recognize that this history includes the murder of and sexual violence against women and trans folks as well, whose stories are often met with silence. With this weight, I share in the great mix of emotions many of us are experiencing. And if we do talk about responding in some way, I want it to be based on reason and compassion, with an understanding of our relationships with black people and our shared histories.
Over the past year, I’ve gotten together with a group of three of my friends who are men every two months or so to read writings by feminist authors. We’ve read fiction, non-fiction, and essays by feminist writers, mostly women of color. It’s been fun for me to connect with my friends in a new way, and for all of us to grow our thinking together and be critical of ways in which we participate in sexism, male domination and rape culture. Here’s essentially what I did to get it going:
During a panel about open authority at #MCN2014, I was struck by a question Porchia Moore asked: “why don’t visitors of color participate at the rates of other groups?” This is a question that I’ve pondered myself for some time, and I appreciated her creating space for discussion with other museum professionals.
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