In September 2025, i travelled to Transylvania, the ancestral homelands of my maternal grandparents. Growing up, my grandparents had an epic-sized influence on my life and my visual DNA. When my family moved to Los Angeles, we made weekly visits to their home, receiving their wisdom, their love of family, food, the importance of beauty, creativity, justice. And for me, my grandfather’s love of every kind of book on art and design, from all over the world, stacked floor to ceiling in a tiny library, served as my entry into a world I’ve never left.
In 2024 I visited the city they were born in, Oradea (now in Romania) or Nagyvarad (the Hungarian name). They spoke so often of this formative place, their powerful love for it. I interviewed them (for a college course) about their experience coming to a new country and learned they hadn’t wanted to leave.
