My Nails Tell A Story: A multimodal visual project
The expressive manicure has deep roots in urban youth culture. By the late 1970s and into the 1980s, alongside the rise of hip-hop and street art, elaborately extended nails became powerful forms of self-expression.
IDEATION, RESEARCH, DESIGN, AUDIO/VISUAL
Following months of rigorous ethnographic fieldwork in Brooklyn nail salons, my research project My Nails Tell A Story brings the fingernail and the practice of manicuring into anthropology’s purview as a critical site for exploring body politics, identity, and relationality.
It invites us to consider the socialities generated by the surface of the fingernail by focusing on the “Expressive Manicure,” a highly stylized and often stigmatized artistic practice shaped by the interrelated creative economies of Black and Asian communities in North America.
Film
My Nails Tell A Story (14:27), which premiered in Amsterdam, follows women in two Brooklyn nail salons. Using poetic visuals, the film explores the manicure as a site of artistry and embodied storytelling, where identity, care, and race intersect.
Interactive Zine
An experimental approach to zine making and theory, where I explored text, photography, and graphic design to merge scholarship and creative practice into an interactive zine. My approach to zine-making is deeply influenced by Zora Neale Hurston’s commitment to using creative ethnography to challenge certain academic traditions.
Poetry
An alternative to traditional ethnographic writing, this piece experiments with using verse to translate research into a more embodied, expressive form of knowledge and storytelling.