A four-part visual series exploring identity, self-authorship, and feminine futurity. The Future Is Her brings together editorial photography and fine art to build a world rooted in presence, memory, and becoming. I wanted this series to reflect the bold strength of Afghan women: the healing we could provide each other after a generation of war and imperialism, education being freedom and a right, the dreams we carry/who we are in our personal spaces, and the beauty we should be able to showcase and not hide form the world. Every detail was chosen to highlight the theme of each part.
The Future Is Her
Role: Photographer, Creative Director, Set Design, Stylist, Makeup Artist
You see an evil eye being painted on her back by a brown girl to a brown girl- that represents that women within the diaspora should be protecting each other, as women in particular— women’s prayers throughout the generations have been protecting, and healing.
The face markings are tribe symbols from the Kuchi tribe in Afghanistan. The hair pieces are traditional jewelry, highlighting the beauty and maximalist culture.
I think of my mother, my sister, and the women in my life who have always been my shield. Their presence lives in me, and in this work.
Through the lens of an Afghan girl growing into womanhood, I explore protection as ritual, prayer, and collective guardianship.
The evil eye: Afghan nazar and Georgian tvali becomes a symbol of resilience, devotion, and the unseen ways women protect one another.
PART I. Protection
PART II. Becoming
The carpet is traditional Afghan carpet design, the dress/jewelry is traditional, the books are specifically all diaspora related. Everything was intentionally curated to represent the education they will never be able to take from Afghan women, even if that’s the case now.
In this visual narrative, a girl builds her world through learning. From the East to the West; even in the middle of chaos. She carries the weight of knowing girls in Afghanistan are being denied the same freedom, and for that reason, education becomes resistance.
As a child of refugees, she holds two worlds at once: tradition and questioning, survival and creation. Learning lives in many forms: in books, prayer, embroidery, and the stories shared over coffee and tea. Here, culture and education exist as parallel paths toward liberation, insisting on a future carried by women- one that is, and always will be, hers.
PART III. Artist’s Lair
I specifically wanted the airplane to be in the shot to represent freedom outside our land. The right to explore the world, and not be trapped in an imperialistic cycle. I chose an airport landing strip to be in the background for the same reasons, to create a sense of movement in the theme.
While a studio is where you make things, a lair is where you become something.
Exist. Think. Make. Even in stillness, she is moving.
This is her lair- where ideas breathe without permission. A psychological space where creation happens freely: unobserved, unbound, and unapologetic. It’s a portrait of the mind, not the body.
The airplane becomes a marker of freedom, movement, possibility, a future that moves. For anyone from a place where creative freedom isn’t a given, the lair becomes an act of resistance.
It says: I exist, I imagine, I create. Building a world with no limits. I often meet myself here.
PART IV. Vanity
What am I going to look like today?
For a long time, this question came from places that weren’t truly mine.
Growing up ethnically mixed, beauty becomes a dialogue: shaped by perception, confusion, and the invisible rules of global standards. You’re asked to choose a side, to explain why you look “exotic,” to translate your face for people who never had to question theirs.
But the truth is, our cultures already came with beauty.
It lives in our jewelry, our colors, our features, our roots. Adornment is not vanity- it’s inheritance, expression, power.
And yet the world traces us, copies us, repackages us. Blueprints get stolen, softened, and sold back as trends. Still, we remain the reference. The muse. The map.