I am not totally sure where to begin but I'm excited and anxious to share the most personal work I have done.
For the next few days I am going to be posting images and words from my story published on @natgeo about being Black and pregnant during a pandemic.
"Giving birth in a time of death: A love letter to my daughter."
I started documenting my pregnancy in March as a way to show our child what it was like to live through a pandemic. This was my way of creating something private and special during weeks of isolation. I have often documented what it’s like to be pregnant as a Black woman and COVID forced me to consider my own story.
This is a story about identity, loneliness, joy and ultimately love. 🌙
Link in bio + stories 🧡 #blacklivesmatter #blackmaternalhealth
Thank you @andreawise_ for the incredible photo editing. More thanks to come. ✨
This work was supported by the National Geographic Society.
After I had Bby, I could barely walk for the first week. My hormones were raging so intensely I would wake up sobbing in a puddle of sweat.
When I took my first assignment at 3 weeks postpartum, milk leaked through my clothes. I was just barely getting the hang of breastfeeding and pumping. I needed more time to learn how to feed and keep a small human alive. And this is basic shit! Parenthood is amazing and so gnarly.
This week, paid family leave was stripped from the Biden spending plan and we are still at zero weeks for paid time off after having a baby. For context, the global average paid maternity leave is 29 weeks; the average paid paternity leave is 16 weeks. We have unjustifiably agreed as a country that women can and must just do it all.
That's bullshit.
I feel such rage for the ways women have been pushed to the margins. Talking about motherhood should not be relegated to mom blogs and treated as a special interest. What we are talking about is a vital, existential and moral conversation that involves literally everyone. This conversation needs to be had loudly until policy and culture changes. We need #paidfamilyleave #savepaidleave
I created a series of portraits with women who had been incarcerated at Bryan Federal Prison in Texas, several of whom told The Marshall Project and NBC News that staff members pressured them into unwanted sexual acts in areas of the prison hidden from cameras and witnesses.
Because of the sensitivity of the story and the need to protect the women’s privacy, much of the process happened remotely through my phone. I wanted the portraits to still feel intimate and emotionally close without fully revealing the women. Working with the ever supportive @zarakatz , we kept returning to the same question: how do you make someone feel seen while still keeping them safe?
Using image transfers, paint, ink, and layered mixed-media collage, I created these images that are fragmented, obscured, but hopefully still deeply human. These women deserve to be heard.
For @marshallproj and @nbcnewsart
I worked on a story about the “free birth” movement for @nytimes This movement is not to be conflated with home births or the work midwives do. Promoters of “free birthing” reject any type of medical intervention (at all) during pregnancy or delivery. When Emily found out she was pregnant in 2021, she had a “wild” pregnancy and was intent on a “free birth.”Things did not go as planned. Now, four years later, she remembers how the hospital’s medical team cared for her. Without them, she could have died — and her son could have, too. I’m grateful to Emily for sharing her experience and I encourage you to read the article.
Excited to share a few of my favorite frames from the “We the People” rebrand campaign for MS NOW, which was just nominated for a News Emmy 🚀
Inspired by historic texts like the U.S. Constitution and Maya Angelou’s Human Family, the campaign really leaned into the humanity of each person we worked with. And if you know me, you know I like to get up close n personal 🥰
The campaign was shot in two parts: vignettes with the network’s news anchors in studio, and a series of portraits of normal, not famous people. Posting a bit of this n that! 1/3
Director + Photographer: 🙋🏽♀️
Production Company: @siblingrivalryco
Producer: @jonkolson
Creative Director: @francesyeoland
DP: @taylorcmcintosh
PD: @alexandrakaucher
Digi: @_alexandrakuhn_
Big love to many more involved @monsonmitch@goldpackaged@ekrhyne@spencerbakalar@adamperez22 and everyone else 🫶🏾
There’s something uniquely intimate about making a portrait of someone whose art is also to see. I had the chance to photograph Chloé Zhao for @npr and it was a beautiful practice in presence and trying to use 10 minutes to create something unhurried and real. Thank you @scruggsworks for the call and @dashaunaemarisa for the assist.
Last year, I had the opportunity to photograph some of the researchers and scientists for @propublica whose work has been directly hit by the drastic NIH cuts under the Trump admin. Spending time with these folks gave me a really devastating and tangible perspective on what these harsh policy decisions actually mean.
Paraphrasing from the excellent reporting in the story, the NIH normally funds research through multiyear grants which provide steady support that lets scientists plan long timelines, hire teams, run complex experiments, and buy the equipment their work depends on. That stability is what let’s important breakthroughs to happen. But all of that had been interrupted. Research tied in any way to “diversity,” “equity,” or “gender ideology” is now being flagged and cut. And that includes work Congress once considered essential like addressing health disparities, preventing stillbirths, reducing LGBTQ child suicide, and understanding infant brain damage. For these researchers it’s not just the experiments they can’t run or the papers that won’t see the light of day. They said they worried about the people who, because of these cuts, will die.
I tend not to cry when I am working but this story broke my brain in a very specific way and it’s taken me a while to want to share. When I worked with @andreawise_ we really wanted to create visuals that felt visceral and urgent.
Really dragged my feet posting much of anything this last year because Instagram feels so reductive. Meh. But lived a lotta life and felt my heart and mind expand more than I could have imagined. So deeply grateful.
Thank you to you. Collaborators, editors, friends, family, my kids preschool teachers, the lady who let me pet her dog when I was sad, the TSA worker who let me fly with an oversized bag, Charli xcx for the running tunes and simply you all. Love u, mean it. 🫶🏾
I went to Mexico earlier this year to photograph Valle de Guadalupe for @afarmedia and it was inspiring. Chef Sheyla Alvarado at Lunario creates menus like someone who knows the land by heart. Almost all of the veggies come from their own farm. The dairy, meat, and honey are grown nearby. The Valle is pretty rural and rugged and to see how people are adapting their restaurants and wineries to the changing climate was really cool to document. The food was also 🤌🏾 Thank you @maheimerman 🫶🏾
Last slide is my creative director really taking over when I wasn’t following her direction. 😂
I’ve been a part of so many lovely projects this year. Shot the cover of @synonym_mag Spices, Issue 3 | Summer 2025 with the homies ✨
@renkofloral is a flower genius and I loved photographing what she created.
Holding onto all the good this summer 🫂
