Teaching Assistant
University of California - Berkeley, Department of Ethnic Studies

“The course traces Islam's journey in America. It will deal with the emergence of identifiable Muslim communities throughout the U.S. and focus on patterns of migration, the ethnic makeup of such communities, gender dynamics, political identity, and cases of conversion to Islam. The course will spend considerable time on the African American, Indo-Pakistani, and Arab American Muslim communities since they constitute the largest groupings. It also examines in depth the emergence of national, regional, and local Muslim institutions, patterns of development pursued by a number of them, and levels of cooperation or antagonism. The course seeks an examination of gender relations and dynamics across the various Muslim groupings, and the internal and external factors that contribute to real and imagined crisis. The course seeks to conduct and document the growth and expansion of mosques, schools, and community centers in the greater Bay Area. Finally, no class on Islam in America would be complete without a critical examination of the impacts of 9/11 on Muslim communities, the erosion of civil rights, and the ongoing war on terrorism.”

In the summer of 2023, Larissa conducted research and engaged with the 20th century art collection at the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe, NM.

Specifically, Larissa was selected to oversee the Gustave Baumann collection including his sketchbooks, preliminary drawings, watercolor and gouache paintings, woodcut blocks, and woodcut prints. The New Mexico Museum of Art holds the largest collection of Baumann’s works in the world. Larissa was tasked with reviewing, correcting, and assessing the the collection and registration records as well as reviewing historical records associated with pieces in the collection.

In addition to her collections research, Larissa was also engaged in preliminary research for her dissertation. Her research at the Museum focused on early 20th century arts movements wherein non-Native and Native artists were collectively responding to and resisting attempts by the State of New Mexico to remove Pueblo people from their traditional lands through unethical policies and acts that favored economic and political regimes.

Larissa will be writing, designing, and producing content regarding Turtle Island and Indian Country and will also looking to expand their skill set by working in a variety of styles and mediums with a clear voice. Larissa will help to expand digital projects, and will have opportunities to work in editing and production on short-form visual storytelling.

The Digital Storytelling Fellowship is awarded from Forge Project. Forge Project centers Indigenous art, decolonial education, and supporting leaders in culture, food security, and land justice. Located on the unceded homelands of the Muh-he-con-ne-ok in so-called New York State, Forge Project works to upend political and social systems formed through generations of settler colonialism.

During summer of 2022, Larissa organized a small and growing collection of audiovisual materials including Navajo language versions of major films and oral histories.

The Pathways Fellowship is awarded from The Association of Moving Image Archivists in partnership with the Navajo Nation Museum.

In the summer of 2022, Larissa joined Stolen Relations: Recovering Stories of Indigenous Enslavement in the Americas, a community-centered database project that seeks to illuminate and understand the role the enslavement of Indigenous peoples played in settler colonialism over time. Her work expanded upon what it meant to decolonize archives and included primary source research and coordinated a new blog for the project.

Stolen Relations is based at Brown University with support from the Center for Digital Scholarship, Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice, Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative, Office of the Vice President for Research, Population Studies and Training Center, and Social Sciences Research Institute.

During the spring of 2022, Larissa participated in this professional development opportunity inspired by the Studio Museum’s mission, which is located in Harlem, NY. This seminar focused on thinking about the theoretical and practical perspectives pertaining to arts and culture work.

During her 2021-2022 proctorship with the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice at Brown University, Larissa facilitated collaborations, assisted with programming initiatives, and conducted her own research around place & Indigeneity, questions of settler colonialism and white supremacy, Black and Indigenous legacies of slavery, and decolonial approaches to archival practices. Her final research project was titled, “Hydrologies / Geologies / Cosmologies: Black & Indigenous Freedom, Resistance, & Kinship”

Larissa received this fellowship which was organized by the Center for the Study of Slavery & Justice at Brown University, Williams College, and Mystic Seaport Museum. During her fellowship period (summer 2021) and a succeeding proctorship (fall 2021-spring 2022), Larissa shared her expertise around the ways in which settler-colonialism, Native dispossession, and racial slavery are intertwined. Particularly, Larissa is interested in how this history informs the way we understand the relationship between Indigenous, Black, and Afro-Indigenous communities and our collective resistance, survivance, and futurities.

Learn more about the Andrew W. Mellon Reimagining New England Histories: Historical Injustice, Sovereignty, and Freedom project

During the summer of 2021, Larissa received an ArtTable fellowship based at the Montclair Art Museum in Montclair, NJ. She joined the exhibition development team for the traveling exhibition, Color Riot!: How Color Changed Navajo Textiles, featuring Navajo textiles from c. 1860 to 2018. Larissa also contributed Navajo-specific educational materials for public and educational programming.

As a curatorial fellow with the Office of Institutional Equity and Diversity at Brown University during the 2020-2021 academic year, Larissa supported the development of Phase II of the Diversity and Inclusion Action Plan (DIAP) in addition to designing and developing Land Acknowledgement trainings, workshops, and statement for use by administrative and academic departments within the University.

For this 2019 summer workshop, Larissa began her ongoing project which critiques the exploitative Native American art markets in the Southwestern U.S. with special attention given to the intersections of gendered and racialized labor and the appropriation of Native culture, ceremony, and art. She received critical support from Gabriel Rockhill and Jennifer Ponce de León.

In the summer of 2019, Larissa worked on the Strengthening Ojibwe Voice Project with the Snake River Fur Post and the Minnesota Historical Society. The project sought to incorporate Minnesotan Ojibwe narratives into the core programs and exhibitions at the Snake River Fur Post, located in northern Minnesota. In this position, Larissa researched the role of Ojibwe women in the 17th-18th century fur trade, recruited visitors to participate in a site assessment regarding recommendations for future research and changes at Snake River Fur Post, and organized a Minnesota-based Native museum professionals and Native educator roundtable discussion about indigenizing the Snake River Fur Post.

Montclair State University, 2023

Paper: “Water Memory: Visual Representations of Water in the Afro-Atlantic”

UC Berkeley, 2023

In the face of climate crisis and continued environmental racism, artists and culture bearers across the African diaspora and the Indigenous Americas are considering their connections to water more deeply than ever. Because these conversations are often siloed along racial and ethnic lines Wading: A Symposium of Black & Indigenous Aquatics will bring together thinkers and creators across both communities to share their disciplinary perspectives, artistic practices, and dreams for liberated aquatic futures.

Florida State University, 2023

Paper: “Mapping Memory, Imagination, and Futurity”

A research symposium in conjunction with the exhibition Shaped by the Loom: Weaving Worlds in the American Southwest, Bard Graduate Center, 2023

Paper: “We Are Alive: Restoring Meaning and Life to Navajo Weavings”

The Association of Moving Image Archives Conference, 2022

The AMIA Fellowship supports paid internships in combination with mentorship and professional development training to forge pathways in the audiovisual preservation field for people from groups historically underrepresented in the profession. The Fellowship welcomed the 2022 cohort in June and this is an opportunity to meet the Fellows and hear a bit about their internship experiences.

The 109th College Art Association Conference, 2021

“Participants of this workshop are invited to engage with the practice of land acknowledgments on a personal level as a creative and critical process of decolonization through guided exercises exploring their relationship to stolen Indigenous land and reflecting on the history, presence, and future of Indigenous Peoples to whom that land belongs.”

As a co-chair for this workshop at the 109th College Art Association Conference, Larissa moderated and guided the workshop and discussions that follow.

Western History Association Conference, 2020

“We’re living once more in a moment where our collective knowledge and understanding of the migratory streams and movements that have built the ecologically diverse, Indigenous, multi-racial, and multi-cultural West that we care for are being questioned and even rejected outright. Our understanding of the West as a set of meeting grounds where diverse peoples have come together and interacted in myriad ways, from the most positive and productive to the most violent and destructive, has to be conveyed beyond the confines of the academy to the larger public.”

As one of the participants in this group, Larissa collaborated with a scholar of Native history to develop and implement a lesson plan based on the scholar's published book.

The 108th College Art Association Conference, 2019

"How has settler colonialism framed our understanding of the museum, the exhibition of art, and the production of art historical scholarship? How can we forward a decolonial curatorial practice that does not replicate oppressive frameworks? How can we imagine the art museum, and art curatorial practice, as engaging with and advancing such futures?"

In February 2020, Larissa presented at the 108th College Arts Association Conference on the, "A Third Museum Is Possible: Towards a Decolonial Curatorial Practice” roundtable.