About me
I am the living dream of my grandmothers, whose names are sacred pearls I hold close. These women had encyclopedic knowledge of the Earth and sustained life and community through empire and erasure.
The first remembered thread of my maternal line begins with my great-great-grandmother, an Indigenous Avar woman. She was blue-eyed and embodied the strength of the mountains she grew up around.
When she died, her eldest daughter, my great-grandmother, gave up her dream of going to university.
Instead, she spent her life tending the land and the animals and the kitchen, in a time before refrigerators and supermarkets.
She did all this without ever being honored for it. My work is a reclamation of her dignity, of her matriarchal wisdom, naming it as sacred and powerful.
I was born in Kenya to an Azerbaijani mother and a Belgian father, and raised across three continents. To grow up this way is to belong everywhere and nowhere. But my roots are deep in the soil of Qakh.
When I was 9 years old, I attended my first protest against the authoritarian regime in Azerbaijan. I shouted, “No to corruption!” and “Yes to democracy” among the bravest people I’ve ever known. Some of those people paid the price of speaking out with their lives.
This experience planted the seed for my lifelong commitment to justice and freedom (azadlıq).
In 2019, I began building Chicks for Climate, a place where feminism and environmentalism came together. Today, we have evolved into Chix, media for the matriarchy.
My work bridges academic research and popular imagination, translating the ancient, living wisdom of matriarchy into language that reaches people who need it most.
I am a member of a global matriarchal council alongside scholars like Heide Goettner-Abendroth and Genevieve Vaughan, two of the most prolific matriarchal scholars of our time. My upcoming book, Matriarchy, makes the case for matriarchy as a necessary alternative to our failing systems.
I do this as a mother raising a daughter and as a granddaughter honoring my lineage. Because the women who came before me never had the chance to be honored, and because I believe we are capable of building the world they deserved to live in.
Previously published works:
Degrees awarded:
B.A. Economics from Barnard College