How do we help people learn, connect, and build a better future together?

I am a mixed Latina/Irish nonprofit leader, creative, writer, mother, and wayfinder.

I advance art and education in service of a more just and joyful world—one rooted in connection, community, creativity, meaning, and belonging. Throughout my career, I have championed cultural work that critiques, inspires, teaches, preserves memory, and reimagines what is possible. I believe that learning belongs everywhere: in classrooms and museums, on stages and sidewalks, across screens, and inside the stories and images that shape how we understand the world.

To that end, I’ve raised $22 million for mission-driven programming and helped create large-scale public education campaigns spanning television, radio, public art, and theater. This work brought public-interest storytelling into collaboration with leading artists, thinkers, and activists including Common, Rosario Dawson, Shepard Fairey, Padma Lakshmi, Eva Longoria Bastón, and Valarie Kaur. While at La Red Hispana - the nation’s largest Spanish-language educational media network and the CDC’s Hispanic agency of record during Covid - I learned to work with government agencies to translate complex public information into multilingual, multiplatform campaigns reaching audiences across the country.

As Executive Director of the nonprofit design lab Amplifier, I co-led a national network of artists and educators using storytelling in any medium necessary—from public art and classroom curriculum to augmented reality, film, digital media, and large-scale public campaigns. Through the Education Amplifier network, we worked with more than 20,000 K–12 educators to bring rigorously reported, open-source storytelling tools into classrooms, reaching one million students. I led partnerships with institutions including the J. Paul Getty Museum, National Geographic, Meta, the Ford Foundation, Pop Culture Collaborative, Discovery Education, Emerson Collective, Education Leaders of Color, and the Stanford d.school, while overseeing more than 30 global public service campaigns on environmental stewardship, public health, civic participation, and more. Under my tenure, Amplifier won a Mirror Award from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Communications, and we shared a stage with PBS’s Judy Woodruff and journalists from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and other leading national publications.

Across my career, I’ve also had the privilege of collaborating with leading social practice arts groups like CONTRA-TIEMPO activist dance theater, Self Help Graphics & Art, and Cornerstone Theater Company—organizations that reimagine what community engagement can mean in creative work.

My own creative practice is an act of deep listening—both to the body and to the world. A former professional dancer, I danced for liberation on the streets, in dance halls alongside figures like Dolores Huerta, and on stages like the Ford Amphitheatre in the Hollywood Hills. I have performed original choreographic works on the campuses of USC, UC Santa Cruz, and the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), and have published poetry, essays, columns, and educational plays. I have also taught writing at Occidental College and elsewhere and created media art for gallery spaces. At Durden + Ray in Downtown Los Angeles, I created an interactive sonic map of a Latin American city for Static, an exhibition that brought artists and journalists together to explore the electric buzz of communication and the relationship between media, perception, truth, and public trust. Across all of my artmaking, I chart the rhetorical maps we live inside, testing our curiosity about where the edges are and which freedoms might lie on the other side. I am perennially interested in the sacred act of becoming: which narratives we inhabit, how they shape us, and how we dance among them.

I hold an M.A. in Journalism from Georgetown University and a B.A. in Modern Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz, with a minor in Latin American and Latino Studies, in honor of my Nicaraguan heritage. A third-generation Angeleno, I live in Northeast Los Angeles with my husband and two sons.