image-maker

I define myself as an image-maker constantly exploring mediums and modalities.

My artistic practice weaves together anthropology at large, critical inquiry to explore stories that challenge erasure and expand cultural understanding.

Rooted in relational, multimodal approaches, I blend photography, film, sound, sketchnoting and experimental writing along with counter-archiving orientations to create deeply collaborative and inclusive engagements.

Drawing on over two decades of experience, I prioritize participatory methods, working closely with communities to elevate voices often marginalized by dominant histories.

My work with Cham Muslim Cambodian communities between SWANA and Southeast Asia focuses on images beyond visuality, asking how images can convey disrupted histories beyond what can be observed, traced and archived. 

Feel free to get in touch for collaborations!

 
 

still images

I find in anthropology and still photography a common ground to open ourselves to others, a path through ‘strong hanging-outs’ and reciprocal curiosity. I have been an amateur photographer since I was 15, and started working as a young aspiring photographer as a lab re-toucher, and fixer-interpreter for international reporters. As an ethnographer and photographer immersed in the mundane, I solely work with analog photography as it engages a reciprocal attunement to time and intimacy both necessary to ethnographic and photographic work.

  • Stilling History is an ongoing project that brings together family photo albums and contemporary medium-format stills made among Cham Muslims in Cambodia. Rooted in long-term multimodal anthropology, it explores how photography can foster ethics, intimacy, and resonance as forms of resistance to both documentary conventions and regimes of transparency. Inspired by Cham ways of holding history—where silence and withholding carry as much weight as explanation—the project asks whether photography can guide us toward evocation rather than representation, so that we may bear witness to erasure through opacity.

    Check the portfolio here.

  • During the pandemic, solo film photo walks through my Utica (NY) neighborhood became, along with my bathroom improvised darkroom stained with DiY caffenol, my only refuge against isolation and looming uncertainty. 

    The daily images that I was to share on Instagram as @m.for.film would also become the imprint of years of an American life about to collapse under the threats of impromptu immigration orders.

    I still sometimes update @m.for.film and see it as a rough sketchbook of random photographic experiments free from the constraints of style, coherence, and consistency, imprinting one drifting after another.

    Life always feels like a draft, so I think a photographic sketchbook should, too.

    Check the portfolio here.

  • Between 2014 and 2018, I stayed multiple times in Iran (Tehran / Qom) for language training and research. 

    The pictures that I was privately posting on social media to friends and family unexpectedly shifted how people around me perceived Iran. I decided to launch my first public Instagram account dedicated to posting one photo a day. 

    This was an attempt to find in ethnographic observations, and the immediacy of phone snapshots and quick poetic annotating, a path through evocation rather than representation—inviting lingering empathy rather than quick judgment.

    Check the portfolio here.

  • Unfinished is an analog photo-ethnographic project documenting in 35mm b&w the daily lives of the Cham communities and families I have been living and working with since the early 2000’s. 

    I had been an amateur photographer for many years at that point, but never really made use of the photographs beyond sharing prints back with participants in regular cycles of distribution

    Later, dust, humidity, and displacement took hold of most of the negatives. I still didn’t know what to make of the photographs. And I was growing disenchanted with both “thick ethnographic description” and humanist reportage. 

    I took a break.

    Time went by, and I moved to full color and medium format. 

    The unfinished project remained just that: unfinished.

    Check the portfolio here.

 

moving images

My film work is grounded in feminist, experimental and sensory ethnography. I have taught documentary practice and visual anthropology at various levels, and reflect on my own process as one embedded in collaboration in multiple shapes, forms and temporalities.

I am interested in what audiovisual representations render opaque and transparent and I  question the engagement of audiences as contributors as in the process. I work at the intersection of still and moving images, beyond medium specificity. I am primarily at home in analog practices and indebted to their material pacing and intimacies in diy practices, but I also bring to the forefront the digital as a space of ethnographic participation. 

  • Currently in development, Sensing History is an ethnographic experimental feature film which furthers the ghostly texture of history explored in Touching Image of History. Investigating how radical perceptions of timespaces can twist our approach to expanded and transcultural cinema, Sensing History conveys an alternative sense of temporality through overlays of still and moving images. Shot on 16mm, the grain of the negative writes a history of erasure, as the film burns out at each screening a little further. In the end, the film is gone, so is the archive, each viewer experiencing memory partially. In its digital iterations, Sensing History is always a supplemental archive of itself: rogue shootings from the back of movie theaters, always explicitly taking angles and positions, the viewer opens up just another subjective record of historiography to which she is herself participant.

  • An invitation to a Cham Muslim wedding in rural Cambodia. An ethnographer doubling as wedding videographer. A day-long event in constant movement. With unstable camera work that never fully settles, the film suggests “taking time” through flows of distraction. The editing unsettles expectations of gendered spaces and activities through layered multiple exposures and dissonant soundtracks. Overall, A Wedding asks whether ethnography can translate experience beyond language as a way to resist story.

    A wedding was screened in 2023 Royal Anthropological Institute Film Festival,at the University of North Florida, (invited online screening), in 2022 at the Society for Visual Anthropology Film Festival (American Anthropological Association Annual Meetings, Seattle, WA), and was nominated in 2021 at the Transmedia Documentaries category of the Muestra de Antropología Audiovisual de Madrid.

  • commute is a film caught between stillness and movement, built from uninterrupted 35mm b&w footage. Shot at 3–5 frames per second, it immerses viewers in a “contemporary city symphony” that superimposes footage from Bangkok and Hong Kong to foreground the materiality and affect of the city (Eikon review). Originally created as an installation for the collaborative exhibition Flux & Navigations (2015 Mellon Expanded Practice Seminar, Cornell University College of Architecture, Art and Planning), commute was publicly released in 2021 in eikon, the digital child of positions: asia critique

    eikon works at the edges of political engagement in the arts. Experiments in thought, image, and politics exposed to a theory-driven political art open unknowns. The politics of aesthetics is a politics we cannot escape.

    Watch it here.

  • Yosof and Timah are getting married. Siblings, neighbors, more-or-less-relatives, and never-seen-before usual suspects gather around the event. Artefacts and actors of the ritual come together to make it all happen according to Cham tradition—or so it is said. But perhaps the union takes place less in the event itself than in its imprint: in the image of the wedding, in the picture-perfect.

    Watch it here.

 

soundwork

Away from screens and an overload of visuality, I see the future of multimodal anthropology, sensory ethnography, and creative ethnography lying in soundwork. Aural closeups engage us in attuned co-presence, deep intimacies and intentional attention.

Aside from the current audio/visual projects that I am developing, I am collaborating with Nat Nesvaderani and others on a collective body of sonic work around the question of Feminist Soundwork. This builds up on some of our previous interventions such as the Sound Politics workshop co-organized with CoMMPCT (The Collective for Multimodal Makers, Publishers,Collaborators, and Teachers) and my Sonic Ethnography course immersing AUC students in an experience of slowing down in and listening to Cairo.

 

sketchnoting & graphic ethnography

For the past couple of years, I have integrated sketchnoting as a method of visual thinking in courses and workshops but also in my own ethnographic and public writing. The practice of sketchnoting emphasizes ideas rather than art, and thinking rather than eloquence (through words). I find it to be a compelling method to reconnect mind and body and to break down complex concepts in a collaborative, fun and hands-on manner in the age of AI. You can see here how I use sketchnotes in courses and workshops on/off campus, and some examples below on how I engage graphic ethnography in public venues.

  • I was an early blogger and have missed long form, personal and engaged online writing making publicly available complex ideas and thorny concepts!

    • Still in its infancy, The Sketchy Anthropologist is a Substack newsletter about all things anthropology, all things sketchnotes, and the nerdy corner that connects them both!

    • In this playful endeavor of public learning I forefront my passion for anthropology as… the science of wonder!

    • The newsletter aims an inclusive learning experience for a wide audience to engage the essential qualities common to both anthropology and sketchnoting:

      • bounciness: the ability to get creative on the spot and,

      • curiosity: an endless openness to wonder about everything and everyone.

    Come check it out!

  • Almost an Artist, Tentatively an Anthropologist: Demystifying "mastery" in Graphic Ethnography Through Refusals and Failures

    Co-organized with Maya Helou, this panel [planned as part of the 2025 Royal Anthropology Institute Film Festival and Conference] seeks to explore notions of ethnographic failure and refusals within the context of graphic methods in the field. We aim to demystify "mastery" in graphic ethnography in particular, and anthropological fieldwork in general, so to embrace discomfort rather than solve it.

    All info and how to apply here.

 

Curation

My first exposure to curatorial practice and theory began by learning from my colleagues at the Reyum Research Institute & Gallery in Phnom Penh, where I was trained to think research and art as one process. In 2007 I improvised an exhibition of scattered family archives from the pre-war(s) 60’s, on the walls of the O’Russei Village Mosque in Cambodia. In 2010 I was invited by the East West Center, at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa, as a co-curator for the Cambodian section of a Cham contemporary culture exhibition. In terms of film curation, my long interest in film practice, theory, and reach crystallized in June 2022 when Nat Nesvaderani and I co-curated The Virtual Otherwise film festival. In this collaborative project, our orientations towards feminist and experimental cinema aimed a re-envisioning of what ethnographic film festivals could be.

  • 2020-2022 | The Virtual Otherwise Film Festival & Conference Co-curator & Conference co-organizer

    Society for Cultural Anthropology / Society for Visual Anthropology

    More here.

  • 2010 | East West Center, University of Hawai’i at Manoa, Honolulu | Exhibition Co-Curator
    Chams: Syncretic Islamic Communities in Vietnam & Cambodia

    • Sourced artifacts and collaborated closely with Cham communities of crafters and producers

    • Partnered with the exhibit designer and EWC lead curator to develop the exhibit layout and display strategies

    • Created visual elements, labels, and supplementary educational materials

    • Designed and led workshops, tours, and public talks

    More here.

  • The O’Russei Exhibit aimed to expose the community’s scattered personal visual archives to its very own members. 

    As I was doing research on the rare family photos remaining from the before Khmer Rouge era, I realized that many of my interlocutors didn’t have access to the portraits of their own loved ones, as those had been scattered.

    I digitized the photographs and made enlargements in order to organize a one day exhibit at the mosque during Eid with the encouragements of the community leaders. 

    Additional prints and engraved CDs were provided to the photographs’ owners, family members and kept in the mosque as a repository.

    More here.