I was diagnosed with HIV in April of 1993, just one month after my third birthday. I am one of over 12,300 remaining adult survivors of pediatric HIV in the United States. My work—shaped by my upbringing as the daughter of an AIDS activist—positions me as an expert in my field as both art maker and  witness to the destruction and resilience of the AIDS epidemic.

I’ve spent the majority of the past decade photographing myself in solitude; my portraits always the sole representation of pediatric HIV on museum walls. This singular presence acts as a testament to the major blind spots in the AIDS art history canon, and the American zeitgeist as a whole.

As a multi-hyphenated visual and performance artist, my work creates spaces of transformation, acknowledgment, and expansion around visual vocabularies of the ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic. While all of my work is not solely HIV-focused, I can never negate that everything I create is a product of my lived experience and therefore assumes an ethnographic approach. By centering myself in my work as an HIV-positive person, I am able to come to all my creations with empathy and nuance.

Through image making, I address personal and political hardships, reconstructing memories as colorfully staged vignettes with the intention of empowering myself and others. By accessing control over my own image, I’ve been able to deflect inherited negative self-perception with the softening of my own gaze. I compose my portraits using a structure of key elements: narrative, site specificity, costume, and subject or object (or both) as performer. Although these elements play a crucial role in production, as the daughter of a jazz drummer, all of my solos are built upon melodic improvisation.

With the acknowledgment that photography and performance are intersecting and interchangeable, my live staged works use a similar improvisational structure that transfers from image to movement. I explore processes of grieving, honoring, and celebrating the body. I weave in healing modalities as a way to interact directly with subjects and viewers as participants.

Over the past five years, I’ve shifted my focus from my own story to the larger historical narratives of HIV-positive women and Lifetime Survivors—people who contracted HIV through birth or in early childhood, before the age of five.

Currently, I am embarking on an interdisciplinary image-based project surveying adult survivors of pediatric HIV in the U.S. I am making contemporary portraits that serve as both restitution and celebration of Lifetime Survivors. This includes extensive research into archival photographs of pediatric populations from the early 1980s and 1990s—the earliest records of our existence. To date, there is no comprehensive body of art or literature that chronicles pediatric HIV over a lifetime. This work is an intimate account of the first and only generation to live through the height of the AIDS crisis from birth to adulthood.

Featured Image: Kia LaBeija, Eleven, 2015. Inkjet Print, 20 x 30." Courtesy of the artist.