As a food anthropologist, I am broadly focused on how individuals and families navigate food systems in the service of their desires to eat in particular, culturally inflected ways. With critical attention to the granular, everyday experiences of navigating broader systems, my work links macro-scale structures to social and material impacts on life conditions. My research asks questions like beyond our basic needs for survival, what does it take to live a decent life, and who gets to decide? My work critically analyzes concepts like justice, interrogating how justice is understood and by whom it is defined? I interrogate concepts like food sovereignty and its possibilities in our contemporary globalized world. I am interested in how people build and maintain community and support networks within broader contexts of inequality and struggles for survival. She studies these issues in Latin America and the Caribbean and among Black and Latinx communities in the United States.

I am Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University, and was previously Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UC San Diego. I was a University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of California, Irvine. I received her PhD in Anthropology at UCLA, an MPH in Global Health from Boston University, and a BA from Rice University.