Topiary is a media artist, film curator, writer and educator. Her research, practice and teaching focus documentary and experimental media related to environmentalism, LGBTQ+ film history and urban studies. While working as the Mellon Curatorial Fellow at the Oakland Museum of California, Topiary contributed to the exhibition and public programming for Queer California: Untold Stories and produced and co-curated the online exhibition Dorothea Lange Digital Archive. They have published critical writing about film in Camera Obscura, Film Quarterly, JCMS, Millennium Film Journal, and their essay about Citizenfour and the anti-representational turn in documentary is included in the edited collection Reclaiming Popular Documentary  (Indiana U Press, 2021).

Topiary earned a theory/practice PhD in Film & Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz and an MFA in Film/Video from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. Her doctor dissertation on city symphony and urban landscape essay film was awarded a Chancellor’s Dissertation Completion Fellowship. Her films, multi-media performances and installation works have been presented in museums, film festivals, theaters and art galleries nationally and abroad. She has received grants and residencies from the MacDowell Colony, the Experimental Television Center, Radar’s Writer’s Lab, and Mount Tremper Arts. She currently lectures in the Film Program at California College of the Arts and in the Film & Digital Media Department at UC Santa Cruz. She has also taught at the School of Visual Arts, CUNY’s College of Staten Island, Pratt Institute and the Media Studies graduate program at New School University in New York City.