Search Work: A Collective Inquiry into the Job Hunt (2025-present)

This project aims to defang one of life’s loneliest activities through an act of collaborative creation. To mark the 10-year anniversary of my jobs newsletter, Words of Mouth, I compiled and edited an anthology on job hunting with 50+ contributors, forthcoming from OR Books in April 2026. My initial pitch call attracted over 1,100 pitches; with the help of four contributing editors, I commissioned and edited 30 full-length contributions and dozens of “micro-stories,” managed the design process with the book designer, and met all publisher deadlines. To supplement the book launch, I hosted a recording booth for job seekers at Pioneer Works, where dozens more job seekers recorded their lived experiences with the hunt. I’m in the process of compiling these recordings into a supplementary hybrid audio/print publication(s).

Cross Reference Coalition, Metropolitan New York Library Council (2025-present)

I was accepted for the first cohort of Cross Reference Coalition, an experiment in interdisciplinary community learning from Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO) led by Dr. Shannon Mattern. The cohort focused on the topic of “The Misfit”, “celebrating our geographic anomalies, pushing against automation’s flattening fakery, and addressing the erasure of difference and the prioritization of profitable utility in our current political climate.” After a semester of site visits and discussions, the cohort is developing a publication with contributions from each of the 16 participants. I’m conducting research with night workers to explore how the third shift both gives a home to self-proclaimed misfits while also making workers profoundly misaligned with normative biological and social systems, and contributing to diminished power in the workplace. Interviewees include nurses and lab staff, hotel workers, customer service reps, electrical lineworkers, taxi drivers, machine operators, and others.

Likeness: An Oral History of Twinship (2022-present)

In late 2022, I, an identical twin, started interviewing twins about their lived experiences, ultimately recording 20 long-form oral history interviews. My goal is to showcase diverse first-person lived experiences, complicating the notion of twinship as a state of either closeness or contrast, a classifiable condition, or a gimmick. I believe deeply in the power of oral history to give literal voice to complexity and contradictions, which twinship is chock full of. The website and video below are part of an ongoing experiment in making research public and poetic.

This audiovisual collage combines archival footage from twin parades and excerpts from an oral history interview. The film footage captures twins participating in a classic public spectacle, caught in moments of joy and amusement, as well as apparent discomfort and boredom. The audio highlights a filler phrase that would typically be cut from a final production—the narrator’s verbal repetition of “I don’t know.” Together, my intent is to underscore one of the uncanny side effects of twinship: the feeling of at once knowing and not-knowing oneself.

Research with public benefits recipients (2020-present)

As a content and learning designer at Civilla, a non-profit design studio, for over five years, I contributed to various research projects with public benefits recipients, and led the design, development, and growth of a worker-focused learning program, Practica, that teaches ethical research and design methods to government and public-sector staff. For one course, I helped produce a mini-documentary about Civilla’s landmark projects: the redesign of America’s longest public benefits application, starring a beneficiary and community research collaborator, Dr. LaTina Denson.

Repair Shop (2021-2025)

Repair Shop is a partnership between me and Sam Bennett. Our public programs and workshops, designed with the goal of making repair skills accessible and commonplace, have taught repair skills to hundreds of people from around the world. Our partners have included Brooklyn Public Library, New York Public Library, NYC Department of Education, Columbia Climate School, donateNYC, and others, and our visible mending work has been featured internationally, in publications such as Harper’s Bazaar, Monopol, i-D Magazine, Hyperallergic, Obscura, The Zoe Report, and Mix Magazine.

Veterans Story Books (2016)

As a member of the content team at Ralph Appelbaum Associates, the world's largest museum exhibition design firm, I worked closely with graphic designer Rob Bolesta to create a series of “Veterans Story Books” that drew on oral histories and archival collections to highlight the various occupations held by veterans of the US Armed Forces. View the storybooks here.