"What Was This Before" is an in progress work that explores the past 12 years I've spent photographing and archiving images related to my family and Hurricane Katrina. "What Was This Before" was then reimagined as an interactive project, with Mani Nilchiani, for the Interactive Actuators exhibit for the Saravenaz Gallery in Shiraz, Iran. Participants walking in front of the piece triggered the images to move, based off the movement of the participant.

Currently "What Was This Before" uses social media and medium format images as a way to bring together the personal and private objects that belonged to my family which were found in the destruction of my grandmother's home post Hurricane Katrina, as well as the images I've taken over the past 12 years documenting my family, friends, our homes and rebuilding efforts post this hurricane. It's part documentary project, part personal archive as a meditation on the anxiety of loss, and a meditation of how culture is represented in the home post trauma.

Collaborator: Mani Nilchiani, developer.

This project has been previously exhibited at B4BEL4B in Oakland and as an interactive project at Saravenaz Gallery in Shiraz, Iran.

"What Was This Before" in the B4BEL4B Gallery, Oakland