Athena is a second-year Ph.D. student in Justice Studies specializing in educational (in)justice at Arizona State University within the School of Social Transformation. Her research investigates how academic segregation was reconstructed following the monumental 1954 Supreme Court ruling, Brown v. Board of Education, which declared the “separate but equal” doctrine unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment. In doing so, she examines the deep rooted nature of domination in education since its inception in parallel with the process of colonial world-making and naming.

Her work is concerned with access to arts education in the wake of No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) and Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015 (ESSA) which mimicked the disillusioned promise of Brown v. Board of Education as it too shifted accountability from the federal government to the states reproducing systemic vulnerability. As a community engaged scholar, she centers on art-based research in traditional and nontraditional educational spaces including her work on arts in corrections. 

In her most recent work, in collaboration with Dr. Tracy Perkins, Associate Professor in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University, she is focusing on the interwoven issues surrounding environmental and educational injustice in her home community and surrounding areas of the Salinas Valley in California.