LINAJES is a collaborative portrait project created in response to displacement, diaspora, and the ongoing pressure to homogenize who we are. It invites participants to reflect on identity not as something fixed, but as something shaped through movement, rupture, inheritance, and becoming.
Emerging from conversations about ancestry, land, memory, and what has been carried (or interrupted) across generations, this work creates space to reclaim identity in the present. Each portrait is shaped through dialogue, intention, and shared reflection, allowing participants to name the symbols, places, and relationships that hold meaning for them.
LINAJES holds space for complexity. It honors identity as something lived and evolving, shaped by diaspora, chosen family, spiritual inheritance, and the desire to remember what systems of erasure have attempted to dissolve. The work offers a contemporary framework for portraiture rooted in care, collaboration, and cultural memory, making it relevant to conversations around identity, belonging, and decolonial storytelling.
Nadeaja
Her lineage holds both Yaqui and Afro-Cuban roots, carried through fragments rather than instruction. From her Yaqui grandmother come feathers, handmade jewelry, and the presence of an indigenous worldview shaped by humility, sharing, and instinct. From her Afro-Cuban lineage comes a spiritual inheritance rooted in rhythm, resilience, and ancestral continuity, even when language, songs, and rituals have been interrupted. Though much of this knowledge was not modeled directly, Nadeaja feels it living in her body and aura. She describes herself as an instrument moving through dreams and intuition to reconnect with an indigenous mentality that has survived through feeling rather than form. In her daily life, reclaiming heritage becomes an act of care and responsibility through motherhood. By embodying emotional presence and refusing numbness, she models for her son a way of feeling, healing, and remembering, allowing lineage to continue not through instruction but through lived example.
Courtney
Raised in Hawaiʻi as a “local Japanese,” Courtney’s lineage is shaped by generations of Japanese families who built their lives on the islands. While her ancestry traces back to Japan, her lived inheritance comes from Hawaiʻi, where Japanese traditions are woven into everyday life through language, food, celebration, and community. This blending of cultures is not something she separates, but something she carries as a whole. For Courtney, lineage is both backward- and forward-looking, shaped by those who came before her and those who will come after. Rather than choosing between identities, she holds them together, honoring her Hawaiʻi self, her Japanese roots, and the life she is building now in the mainland.
Photographed at the edge of the Pacific Ocean, the water becomes both boundary and bridge. From this shore, the next land encountered is Hawaiʻi, situating her lineage within an island experience shaped by movement, crossing, and the pull between home and elsewhere, offering a feeling of home expansive enough to hold all of who she is.
