Laura Menchaca Ruiz is a visual anthropologist and media maker from the borderlands of the U.S. Southwest, currently residing in Bethlehem, Palestine. Her research and visual work are rooted in multi-sensory ethnography, epistemologies at “the margins,” feminist, gender and sexuality studies, decolonial approaches to space and place, and beauty as a method (see Saidiya Hartman, 2019 and Christina Sharpe, 2019). Laura is a Visiting Assistant Professor in Media Studies and the Division Head of Humanities and the Practicing Arts at Al-Quds Bard College; Co-Founder and Creative Director at Element Media; Co-Founder of the feminist filmmaking collective, Ethnocine; and a Producer for the Bad Feminists Making Films podcast. Her creative work celebrates the marks that people make on the world, highlighting the extraordinary in the ordinary, and her scholarship explores the reach for autonomy amidst marginalizing constraint. Her approach to all her work treasures the local, the small-scale, the personal, the eccentric, the intimate—whatever is made out of love and caring and respect.