Volunteering for Las Fotos Project

Las Fotos Project

Photography Mentor for Las Fotos Project (2016 - 2019)

Her Choice: Facts, Freedom & Justice, 2019.

I was one of two mentors for Maya Rosado’s solo exhibit on reproductive rights in Los Angeles. As a creative designer with a background in Sexuality Studies, it was a great honor to help Maya with her creative vision. In addition to providing overall support on the strategy, writing, and photography portion of the exhibit - I was especially excited to collaborate with Jessy (Program Manager) to creative this wonderful Herstory of The Pill timeline. It started out as a sketch I made, and Jesse brought it to life! It was a pleasure to collaborate with everyone on this iconic exhibit.

It was a true pleasure to work on such an important exhibit as one of my last contributions to Las Fotos Project.

I hope to return to LFP as a teaching artist in the future.

• Hire Her, 2018 to 2019

• Esta Soy Yo, Fall 2018

  • As a Las Fotos Project mentor I work directly with teenage girls by encouraging their creative and technical execution of photography. The program serves girls from the ages of 11-18, providing them with the tools for critical thinking, visual communication, and media literacy through a series of personal development activities. The innovative program uses therapeutic photography methodology and a project-based learning model. Esta Soy Yo serves approximately 100 students each year through 12-week sessions in the spring and fall.

  • Los Angeles Magazine Review

• Kindred Book, Fall 2017 - Spring 2018

  • I'm one of the mentors involved in a program about self discovery, intimate memories, family portraiture, and image preservation. At the end of this nine-month program, the young students and I will create a book documenting their experience as they dive into old family images and simultaneously create new memories.

• Limitless, Fall 2016

  • An intensive program for adolescent girls, ages 14-16, where I encourage girls to use photography, mindfulness, and self-care to improve their mental wellbeing. This program's primary focus is to provide a safe environment to share their story, develop coping skills, and help promote resiliency. It's been incredibly rewarding to actualize my feminist principles through the art of community engagement, self-esteem building, mindfulness, photography, and girl power!

• Summer of Self-Care, Summer 2016

  • I was able to contribute to the Summer of Self-Care experience where 17 girls spent four weeks reflecting, photographing, journaling and talking about self-care and self-love.

  • I was given the opportunity of teaching the young girls inDesign which was an exciting challenge to explain the program efficiently and comprehensively. The experience of giving an inDesign crash course brought me face-to-face with Albert Einstein's famous quote: "if you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough."

  • Towards the end of the 3-day workshop, I collected the work and created the Summer of Self-Care zine by digitizing their illustrations and incorporating it throughout the aesthetic of the zine.

• Esta Soy Yo, Spring 2016