“American Slavic” was started as my thesis collection from my time at Rhode Island School of Design and continued to expand into the early years of the pandemic. Simply put, the collection sought to marry modern art movements from the Slavic world with traditional crafts and techniques from the same cultures and contextually place these concepts in an American narrative. The goal was to make objects that belonged to Slavic culture but told stories that could only be told by the descendant of Slavic immigrants to America. The body of work was characterized by extensive material exploration combined with ethnographic and art history research, which led to the development of my signature ethnodesign style that I call Folk-Modernism.