Afro Hair - Material, Memory + Embodied Pratice

I graduated from the Aveda Institute in 2014, but my relationship with Afro hair began long before licensure. Raised in a household where relaxers were withheld until adulthood, I once resented what I now recognize as the beginning of my education in Black embodiment: learning that hair is not simply something we style. It is material. Memory. Time. Relationship.

Afro hair is deeply sacred to me—defying gravity, carrying lineage, recording environment, and refusing the demand to become easier to manage. Through cosmetology school and years as a commercial stylist, I came to understand the beauty industry as a system built around speed, extraction, and the commodification of the Black body. The Black Beauty School Cosmos emerged from this reckoning: a refusal of colonial timelines imposed on textured hair through harmful coloring practices, careless technique, and the expectation that our bodies should accommodate the industry rather than the industry learning how to care for our bodies.

I remain a licensed cosmetologist, but hair has become something larger in my practice. It is one of the materials through which I study relationship: what happens when we slow down long enough to learn what a material is doing rather than forcing it toward an outcome. This means removing unnecessary mediation between people and their own hair, undoing harm, returning to slow intention, and restoring the kitchen-table knowledge of our grannies.

That practice continues through Afroscape, an evolving field guide to Afro hair and the Black body. Through texture, moisture, movement, environment, technique, and embodied observation, Afroscape asks what becomes possible when we understand our hair as an ecosystem rather than a problem to manage.
Our coils require time, attention, care, and reverence. In tending them, we tend ourselves.

Teaching as Creative Practice

My teaching practice moves across classrooms, salons, colleges, community spaces, workshops, digital platforms, and social space. I have taught within institutions including Holyoke College, Vanderbilt University, and Oberlin College; trained and taught across salons; developed online workshops; and built public-facing educational work outside traditional classrooms.

I understand teaching as a creative medium of its own. Like the rest of my practice, it begins with relationship: with the people in the room, the material being explored, the knowledge already present, and the conditions necessary for curiosity to become possible. I build learning environments rather than simply delivering information—spaces where people can encounter material, experiment, ask better questions, and develop knowledge through relationship.

Afroscape — Hair as Living Archive

Afroscape extends beyond the page. The hair installation translates the developing field guide into physical space, using Afro hair, texture, form, image, technique, and accumulated material knowledge to ask what changes when hair is encountered as an ecosystem rather than an object requiring management.
The installation grows from the same inquiry as the Afroscape book: Afro hair carries information. It records moisture, environment, manipulation, movement, time, technique, inheritance, and care. What appears visually as texture is also evidence of relationship.

Afroscape brings together my developed craft as a cosmetologist, educator, researcher, writer, designer, and maker—not as separate disciplines, but as different ways of studying and tending the same material.
By moving this inquiry from book to installation, Afroscape becomes something that can be entered and encountered. Hair becomes archive, landscape, material, and teacher. The installation asks the viewer to slow down, look closely, and consider what Black hair can teach when we stop demanding that it conform and begin paying attention to how it lives.