Selected Articles + Publications

NPR: Rihanna's maternity style isn't just fashionable. It's revolutionary, experts saY (February 2023)

CENTER FOR CRAFT: CRAFT CAN THINK TANK (PUBLISHED aUGUST 2022)

Mural Arts Philadelphia: The Milkscapes project: A celebration of motherhood

Deem Journal: Designing Motherhood on rethinking reproduction (2021)

Design Miami: Designing Motherhood (September 2021)

Vogue: A New Exhibition in Philadelphia Examines the Hidden Histories of Reproduction (August 2021)

The Lily: Forceps, breast pumps, IUDs: This exhibit puts motherhood on display (June 2021)

The New York Times: Menstrual Cups in Museums? It’s Time (June 2021)

While working on honing my public-private real estate development toolkit, my interests have allowed me to take a deeper look at the connections between city planning, real estate development, and public health; more specifically looking at how city planning efforts can help lessen the disparities of infant and maternal mortality in Philadelphia. Take a look at my unpublished op-ed here. 

Exhibitions + Installations

Designing Motherhood: Things That Make and Break Our Births

Mütter Museum, Philadelphia, May 8, 2021 – April 30, 2022; Center for Architecture and Design, Philadelphia, Sept 10 – Nov 14, 2021

MassArt Art Museum, Boston, MA, June 11, 2022- December 18, 2022

Bill & Melinda Gates Discovery Center, Seattle, WA, February 16, 2023-December 30, 2023

Birth is the way we all arrive in this world. And each of us has, or will at some stage in the future, repeat, prevent, rethink, or reject that process of reproduction. As we do, we’ll interact with designs of all kinds—tools, techniques, systems, and customs—to make and break these cycles.  

Design impacts each step in the arc of human reproduction, from the intrauterine device that prevents the process of fertilizing an egg, to the midwife who advocates for culturally appropriate care or the breast pump flange that helps produce, gather, and store breast milk.

But who shapes these designs? Some of the objects and systems you’ll encounter in this exhibition are the product of medical knowledge that was once guarded, like the forceps, while others have been shaped by dire need and collective political will, like the at-home abortion kit and women’s health zines. Still others have been conceived by feminist engineers frustrated at the lack of innovation in designs for reproductive health, such as the twenty-first-century silicone pessary.

Multimedia Projects

For the Babies

Designing Motherhood Narrative Portraiture Project, Co-Director

For The Babies is a film in three short episodes that celebrates the history of a Philadelphia-based nonprofit, Maternity Care Coalition (MCC), through the stories of its direct care staff who have, for forty years, been making sure birthing people and their babies survive and thrive in this city. The project takes its lead from afrofuturist author Octavia Butler, drawing inspiration from her seminal book Parable of the Sower.

Rights to these stories are held by the storytellers themselves.

The storytellers are direct service staff at MCC and they shared their experiences as a way to highlight labor that often goes unseen and underpaid. Each storyteller was in control of how their narrative was presented here, but future audiences for their narratives may be far wider than we or they ever imagined. When you listen to their experiences, consider your own relationship to what they shared, and how you value their labor and how you participate in the social systems that determine how we care for those who do care work.

Episode 3: Knowledge, Education, & Wisdom; Episode 4: Housing, Land, & Environment; and Episode 5: Systems Change can be found here.

Selected Public Speaking Engagements

I am a TEDxPhiladelphia speaker and have done speaking events, keynotes. workshops, panels, and lectures for the University of Pennsylvania, New York University, Drexel University, Generate Health (St. Louis, MI), the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning, the Hindsight Conference at Hunter College, and various high schools, universities, and local organizations across the United States.

If you would like me to speak at your school, conference, or any other event, please reach me through the contact page. I am also available for public speaker training. Contact me for a brief consultation and let’s create a plan for showcasing your best self!

A conversation exploring how the design of reproductive objects, systems, and policies affects all of our lives. Panelists include Nashira Baril, director, Neighborhood Birth Center Boston; Christy Turlington Burns, internationally recognized icon and founder of Every Mother Counts; Jennie Joseph, one of the world’s most respected midwives and authorities on women’s health; Gabriella Nelson, associate director of policy, Maternity Care Coalition Philadelphia; and moderated by Michelle Millar Fisher, co-curator of Designing Motherhood.

Does living in a well-designed city make you healthier? How can surfing increase your creativity? Have you ever wondered why hospitals are so ugly? Bon Ku is a physician and an avid fan of design, food, surfboarding and Medicine. In each episode of DESIGN LAB, Bon and his guests tell stories about how the worlds of design, art, science and health intersect. Listen and learn new insights, hacks and design principles that you can apply to your own life.

The womb. How is the pandemic, coupled with this moment of racial reckoning, impacting our very first HOME? Texas’ recent anti-abortion law make the fight for reproductive justice being more pressing then ever, especially for black and brown women. The stats have also made it alarmingly clear that the simple process of birth continues to be a health risk for Black women tragically mis/undertreated by the medical establishment.

This talk will explore how the complex nexus of conditions that threaten the womb and how artists, doulas and reproductive justice advocates are rising to its defense.

Additional Work