Headlands Center for the Arts

Artist Statement

My work weaves my Filipino heritage, queer identity, and community into dance, film, site-responsive performance, social practice, dialogue, and food. I explore diaspora, resilience, and the tension between personal memory and collective history. Rooted in decolonization, I reclaim my relationship to land and body while uplifting marginalized voices. Confronting intergenerational trauma shaped by settler colonialism and white supremacy, I transform inherited shame into empowerment and reclaim my Filipino identity through Kapwa—an Indigenous Philippine philosophy of shared selfhood grounded in love, spirit, nature, and community.

I believe all my work is ritual and site-specific, whether in a theater, on a beach, or in a parking lot. Blending physicality, archival research, and ancestral memory, I craft performances that move toward liberation. I create new formats to serve queer, intergenerational, and BIPOC communities, including WAKE—an immersive club ritual in Los Angeles for collective grief and healing.

I am equal parts clenched fist and open heart.

While at Headlands

While at Headlands, I will continue my research into Filipino street festival activations that reenact colonial rituals such as Holy Week and Sinulog — the so-called “gift” of Christianity. I will examine these practices through a queer, diasporic post-colonial lens, holding their beauty and their violence at once. I am interested in how acts of penance and reenactment (whipping, veiling, procession) might shift from spectacles of suffering into embodied sovereignty. My process is somatic and research-driven, moving between archival study, ancestral memory, improvisation, and collaboration. The Headlands’ elemental landscape (its wind, cliffs, and layered histories) will shape this inquiry, offering both confrontation and clarity.