Embodied Inquiry

I am an artist, educator, interdisciplinary creator, and mender of sorts. I Am AveMagnolia emerged from years of witnessing how trauma, oppression, embodiment, memory, survival, and relational conditioning reverberate simultaneously through individual bodies and collective systems.

The project began in 2020 as both an interdisciplinary performance work and a participatory inquiry process exploring the relationship between personal trauma, systemic violence, collective conditioning, embodiment, healing, and liberation. Over time, that inquiry evolved into two interconnected but distinct bodies of work: I Am AveMagnolia, an embodied artistic and participatory inquiry project, and a separate forensic neurobiology framework housed under AveMagnolia Systems examining violence, sensory processing, trauma, embodiment, and systemic harm through biological, relational, and social ecological lenses.

While distinct, both projects remain in conversation with one another. They emerge from a shared question:

What happens to bodies shaped by violence, fragmentation, silence, domination, survival, and systemic oppression — and what becomes possible when those same bodies are allowed witness, movement, memory, grief, pleasure, authorship, and collective freedom?

Throughout my work, I am interested in the visible and invisible ways trauma reverberates through:

• the body

• relationships

• language

• power

• identity

• institutions

• and collective systems.

I am particularly interested in how oppression becomes normalized, inherited, embodied, rationalized, and reproduced socially, politically, relationally, neurologically, and physiologically — and how artistic inquiry, collective witnessing, embodiment, and participatory process can interrupt that repetition.

The body functions as a central site of inquiry throughout my work. Not only as a site of injury, but as a site of memory, medicine, resistance, imagination, transformation, and liberation.

Drawing from liberation pedagogy, participatory inquiry, movement practice, trauma studies, neuroscience, social ecological frameworks, feminist and decolonial thought, community knowledge systems, and interdisciplinary artistic practice, I hope to contribute to new ways of understanding the relationship between embodiment, power, violence, relationality, and collective healing.

At the center of everything is a belief that bodies contain knowledge systems too often silenced, erased, pathologized, violated, or forced toward disappearance.

This work insists on their authorship.