is a Ph.D. candidate in Visual Studies with an emphasis in Global Studies at the University of California, Irvine, where he is thinking about contemporary art, political ecology, and decolonial geography. His dissertation, presently titled “Land, Art, Liberation: Groundings of Revolutionary Ecology,” rearticulates the historical tendency of land art within the context of global U.S. imperialism, analyzing vignettes of visual culture produced alongside resistance to military occupation, social movements for agrarian reform, and anti-colonial national liberation struggles. Aaron’s writing has appeared in Pacific Arts and Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography.
Aaron is a co-director of the Environmental Humanities Research Cluster at UCI and a co-founder of the Climate Futures Collective. He earned a B.A. from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa in 2018, graduating summa cum laude with honors in Art History and a certificate in Environmental Studies. His arts-based practice is Hillside Slides.
In addition to his scholarly work, Aaron is currently a curatorial researcher with the Orange County Museum of Art for their participation in the 2024 Getty Pacific Standard Time: Art x Science x L.A. exhibition. He was previously a Humanities Out There Public Fellow with Orange County Environmental Justice and has worked in various capacities with the UCI Humanities Center, Honolulu Mayor’s Office of Culture and the Arts, Institute and Museum of California Art, Laguna Art Museum, Salvage Public, Honolulu Museum of Art, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa Art Galleries, and John Young Museum of Art.
Aaron is a haole (white, non-Native) scholar based in occupied Hawai‘i and on Tongva and Acjachemen lands in the area now known as Southern California.
