I am a Chicago-based anthropologist working with ethnography, performance, and artmaking to expand awareness of people’s creative efforts to deal with the aftermath of harm and to craft hopeful futures.

I am the author of Bosnian Refugees in Chicago: Gender, Performance, and Post-War Economies (2022), a journey covering nearly three decades of political and economic ruptures in the lives of Bosnian women refugees of the 1990s wars in former Yugoslavia. The book draws on critical approaches to ethnography, performance, and refugee studies in order to illustrate the constraints women have contended with in their efforts to remake their lives, and shows that they insist on understanding their wartime losses as simultaneously social and material.

My ongoing research and teaching interests include a focus on food, urban place-making, and wellbeing in Chicago’s north side refugee corridor, post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina, and post-Katrina New Orleans. You can read my essay about the social practice artwork Solitary Gardens here, a book chapter about the social work of Bosnian coffee practices here, and a co-authored essay about making the Field Museum’s Pandemic Collection here.

I have held academic appointments at Mount Holyoke College, Loyola University Chicago, and the University of New Orleans, and I am a research associate at the Field Museum. I have developed curatorial and education programs for the Field Museum and the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and I have longstanding relationships with the social sculpture projects Solitary Gardens, led by artist jackie sumell, and ŠTO TE NEMA, led by artist Aida Šehović.

I am a girl from the middle. I have great affection for the Mississippi River (I was born at its head and lived for some years at its mouth) but my heart is at the southern tip of its longtime sister, Lake Michigan, in metro-Chicago, where I grew up and raised my son.