She completed her Ph.D. in cultural anthropology at the University of Virginia with a dissertation entitled “Blanqueamiento (whitening) in Paradise: Nation-building, Japanese Immigration and Race in the Dominican Republic.” From 2010-2011, she was a postdoctoral fellow at Waikato University and Auckland University in New Zealand and, before that, a qualitative researcher on several public health programs and research projects for the Latino Commission on Aids in NYC. She has published on issues of belonging, immigration and racism in the Dominican Republic and is currently working on several oral history projects on the Lower East Side and in the Bronx.