The Work

As a former winemaker and current Cultural Anthropologist (MA, SOAS University of London; PhD Candidate, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), my work focuses on the intersection of food and labor. I believe my responsibility as an anthropologist is to document cultural practices, and use that documentation to help communities maintain sovereignty over their cultural lands and food systems—whether those involve farming, fishing, or hunting.

Growing up on the San Francisco Bay, I spent my youth seeking out salmon and diving for abalone. These were more than hobbies; they were cultural practices that brought my family and friends together to harvest from the ocean. These cultural practices were reasons to come home, to reaffirm my connection to home, and to have a reason to defend that place from social and environmental degradation. Throughout my life, those cultural practices have gone away, threatened by the exploitation of our planet by corporations. I believe such traditions are essential for food sovereignty and are the primary means of maintaining agency over the futures of our communities.

As an anthropologist, I have primarily documented industrial environments where work is reduced to a wage and labor consumes the body. After studying Winemaking for my undergraduate degree, I spent seven years as a traveling winemaker across five continents—tossing barrels, cleaning tanks, and operating heavy machinery in South Africa, Argentina, Australia, France, and California. My research is rooted in the lived understanding of the physical toll living in America takes on your body; it began through the observed degradation of my own body as I balanced the demands of engaging with the outdoors with the heavy physical burden of sixty-hour work weeks in the winery.

Over the last eight years, as a researcher and activist, my work has focused on building public awareness around farmworker issues and as a union organizer and ethnographer in North Carolina’s Amazon warehouses. At my core, I am a writer. I utilize ethnography and poetry to tell stories about the lived realities of workers across the world and my own experiences as a worker, fisherman, the son of a San Francisco Cop, and someone who has experienced chronic pain two neck surgeries over the last three years after injuring my neck surfing Ocean Beach in San Francisco in 2020. Over the years, my work has come to encompass filmmaking as a necessary extension of my commitment to the communities with whom I work. My fieldwork is not short-term. I spent a decade in agriculture and have been working with Amazon workers in North Carolina for over four years. I work to ingratiate myself with communities over time, using the lens to reach the core of what people are feeling about their lives and the changing nature of human labor.

In 2026, I am returning to the land my grandparents had to leave — conducting immersive ethnographic fieldwork aboard the family-owned whitefish vessels of Castletownbere, Co. Cork, in partnership with the Irish South & West Fish Producers Organisation, to document the living heritage of Ireland's last inshore fishing fleet before it disappears.