About

Carlyn is an artist, educator and critically engaged scholar/researcher from Durham, North Carolina whose work is grounded in a commitment to creative practices as a form of critical inquiry and social transformation. She uses visual and creative methods, including photography, collage and self-portraiture, alongside collaborative inquiry and personal narratives to explore experiences that extend beyond what can be captured through words alone. Her artistic practice is not separate from her research- it is a parallel way of asking questions, making meaning, and examining how knowledge is produced using a different set of tools. As a critical scholar, she is committed to exploring how research is situated within historical, societal, and political contexts to interrogate power structures and injustices. Carlyn’s work is grounded in a commitment to situating those most affected as the most significant and essential narrators of their lived experiences. Her methodological approach is rooted in collaborative and participatory practices, consent and trauma-informed epistemologies and slow ethics, and aims to expand the ways in which knowledges are produced and shared, and challenge whose and what kind of knowledges are deemed valid.  Her work reimagines research as a creative and ethical practice that generates new knowledge, fosters new relationships, and opens possibilities for meaningful change.

Carlyn is a proud graduate of the Durham Public School system, holds a BA in Sociology from Wesleyan University, an MA in Arts Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and is currently a doctoral candidate in Critical Psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center (City University of New York). She resides in Durham, NC, with her toddler Remy, her dog Blue.