Learning to See, Learning to Be Seen
My portfolio pages show what I've built. This page is about how I became someone capable of building it, three schools, three disciplines, and a slow, sometimes uncomfortable education in two things at once: how to see a space clearly, and how to stand in front of people and defend what I saw.
University of Louisiana at Lafayette
Studio doesn't let you hide. You pin your drawing to a wall and a panel of people you respect tells you, out loud, what's wrong with it. I spent five years learning to see vibrancy in a space, the felt quality that doesn't show up on a floor plan, and then learning to say what I saw in a room full of people trained to want proof.
Being seen, at first, meant being wrong in public, often. It also meant the moment a juror stopped arguing with my instinct and started building on it. I graduated with the Design Excellence Award, but what I actually carried out of Lafayette was the habit of standing behind an observation even when I didn't yet have the language to defend it.
Front porch, gumbo, Cajun culture. It's at the root of everything I do.
Boston Architectural College
Graduate school raised the stakes on both fronts. I was arguing that sense of place does measurable work on a body in pain, a claim that needed real evidence, not just a good eye. Learning to see meant reading trauma research alongside design theory until they stopped being two subjects.
Being seen meant defending that thesis to a committee, people who could simply say I hadn't proven it. The thesis won the Edwin T. Steffian Centennial Award. What mattered more was learning that rigor and care aren't opposites. You can be held to a high standard and still be gentle with what you're studying.
University of Washington
My dissertation asks how queer bookstores in Seattle hold room for trans belonging and embodiment. This is where seeing and being seen stop being separate chapters and start happening in the same room, at the same time. I'm a trans researcher studying trans belonging. I can't observe from a safe distance. I'm inside the question I'm asking.
The rigor here is real: comprehensive exams, IRB review, a committee that questions every claim, three consecutive years of Simpson Center funding I've had to earn again each time. I hold that rigor alongside frameworks from Black feminist geography, care ethics, and queer phenomenology, work by scholars like Sara Ahmed, who insist that being precise and being political were never in conflict. Being seen by my peers, in this program, has meant asking them to take belonging seriously as data, not sentiment.
"To be willing to go astray, to move away from the straight and narrow, to wander, is to open up the possibility of new worlds." — Sara Ahmed
Three schools, one demand underneath all of them: see clearly, then let yourself be seen clearly in return. Lafayette taught me to trust an instinct before I could prove it. Boston taught me to prove it. Washington is teaching me to hold both at once, in a field of study I'm also living inside. That's the same discipline PatchWork Society asks of me now.
Learn about PatchWork Society