She has been working with the Arsi Oromo in Ethiopia (the Arsi are a subgroup of the Oromo ethnic group) and conducting fieldwork since 2002, independently and in conjunction with a French research team and the UNESCO – Norway funds-in-trust project on Ethiopian instruments, music and dance (2005-2009). Her PhD research, for which she held a Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholarship (2010-14) and was a member of the SSHRC – MCRI project, Advancing Interdisciplinary Research in Singing, she focused on ateetee, an Arsi women’s sung dispute resolution ritual; the dissertation examined how an expressive form enables women to peacefully protect, promote and claim their rights in a rapidly changing social environment. Her current research project focuses on marriage by abduction and other challenges facing young Arsi women, and their strategies – especially the use of expressive arts – for questioning, resisting and changing cultural practices. She plans to use collaborative, participatory video work as a primary medium to create collaborative representation of Arsi stories. Her aim is to create a research-creation dissemination model that will constitute action for young women and includes ethnographic research, multimedia collaborations, and representations of the women’s expressions.