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CULTURE ▽ ART ▽ COMMUNITY
Contraband: The Adventures of the Amazing Doña Fefa
This interdisciplinary performance work that merges theater, ritual, and psychospiritual storytelling to explore identity, fragmentation, integration and liberation.
At the center of the work is Doña Fefa sharp-tongued, irreverent, and deeply intuitive spirit guide who moves between worlds: the living and the ancestral, the comedic and the prophetic, the personal and the political.
Through her, the piece navigates the inner landscape of the protagonist, Luz, who encounters a constellation of selves, spirits, and inherited histories.
Structured as both a theatrical journey and a ritual process, Contraband unfolds through encounters with archetypal figures ancestors, inner children, cultural ghosts, and spiritual forces each representing aspects of memory, trauma, desire, and power.
Set against the socio-political realities of migration, colonial legacy, and cultural survival in the United States, the work interrogates what it means to carry contraband: not only physical goods, but identities, stories, spiritual practices, and ways of knowing that have been criminalized, hidden, or forced underground.
Blending humor, confrontation, and ceremony, Contraband transforms the stage into a site of reckoning and integration where the self is not singular, but a living system in negotiation with history, spirit, and possibility.
Girl Be Heard at the Guggenheim
At the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Girl Be Heard Performance Company transformed the museum into a site of youth-led disruption, inquiry, and artistic intervention.
Young performers devised original works engaging themes of identity, migration, gender, and justice bringing their voices into direct conversation with an institution historically associated with canonized art and cultural authority.
Set within the Guggenheim’s iconic spiral, the performance reoriented the audience experience: viewers were not passive observers but witnesses moving through a living narrative shaped by the urgency of the present political moment.
In a time marked by heightened immigration enforcement and cultural polarization, the work positioned young people many from marginalized communities as cultural producers and truth-tellers. Their presence within the museum challenged dominant narratives about whose stories belong in spaces of prestige.
The project reimagined the museum not as a static container of art, but as an activated civic space.
What About the Children?- Public Art Mural Project
The Public Art Mural Project at PS 15 was a collaborative visual arts initiative engaging young people in the creation of a large-scale mural rooted in their collective experiences and visions.
Through workshops in storytelling, design, and visual symbolism, students explored themes of identity, belonging, community care, and social justice. The mural-making process emphasized collaboration, dialogue, and shared authorship.
In a broader political context where public education spaces are often under-resourced and overlooked, the project positioned the school as a site of cultural production and imagination.
The final mural stands not only as an artwork, but as a declaration: that young people are authors of their environments, narrators of their communities, and contributors to the visual and cultural landscape of the city.
Untold Stories with Storytelling Arts
This project emerges from a central question: Who gets to be remembered, and how?
Untold Stories is a collaborative storytelling and performance initiative that centers individuals whose lived experiences exist outside dominant narratives particularly those impacted by migration, systemic inequity, and cultural erasure.
Participants engage in a multidisciplinary process that blends oral history, theater-making, movement, and writing. Through this work, storytelling becomes both a creative practice and a form of testimony an act of reclaiming voice in a society that often renders certain lives invisible.
Situated within the socio-political landscape of the United States marked by immigration enforcement, displacement, and cultural fragmentation the project honors storytelling as a form of resistance. It creates space for layered identities across Afro-Latinx, Caribbean, and diasporic communities to be expressed in their full complexity.
Untold Stories functions as a living archive one shaped not by institutions alone, but by the people themselves.
Project Cimarrona
Project Cimarrona is an interdisciplinary performance and cultural research project rooted in the histories of cimarronaje—the resistance practices of enslaved Africans who escaped and formed autonomous communities throughout the Caribbean and Latin America.
Drawing from these legacies, the work explores contemporary forms of escape and liberation within the context of migration, borders, and systemic control. It asks: What does it mean to be free in a world still structured by colonial logics?
Blending ritual, movement, storytelling, and spiritual practice, Cimarrona engages Afro-Caribbean cosmologies as living systems of knowledge. The body becomes a site of memory—holding ancestral knowledge, trauma, and possibility.
The project exists across multiple dimensions: performance, site-responsive installations, and community-based activations. It creates a bridge between past and present, positioning ancestral resistance as a guide for navigating current political and environmental crises.
Cimarrona is both a return and a reimagining.
Portfolio
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