Her research examines questions related to race, representation, and activism in Brazil. She earned her BA in Anthropology from the University of Virginia and her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Cornell University. She is currently completing her book Visualizing Black Lives: Afro-Brazilian Activist and Alternative Media, an ethnography of the ways in which Afro-Brazilians produce visual images and narratives that are more faithful to their everyday experiences and lives than those images found in mainstream Brazilian media. Her work has appeared in scholarly journals including Communication, Culture, and Critique, Feminist Media Studies, Black Camera, and Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies.