I have criss-crossed the country on my over 20 plus trips by motorcycle, bicycle, car, helicopter, plane, skis, and my own two feet. I have experienced Afghanistan through its landscape and its people that shared their stories, their homes, their food, and their dreams with me. My initial projects were in women’s prisons, a women’s heroin rehab center, girls’ and boy’s education in remote mountain villages, and the deaf community in Kabul.
My passion was with the youth culture that I was exposed to on my very first visit in 2008. I worked with a group of Afghan photographers to create a pop-up traveling street art installation Streets of Afghanistan in 2012, and I worked with creatives in Kabul to support the first graffiti workshop for Afghan artists.
In 2009 I became the first person to mountain bike in Afghanistan and soon my work focused around women’s cycling. I began to train and coach the first generation of women to cycle in 2013. I produced a film, Afghan Cycles that documented the National Cycling Team and the first women-founded, women-led cycling team in the central province of Bamiyan over the period of 5 years. Over the eight years that followed, a thriving cycling scene developed across multiple provinces and multiple disciplines. I have spoken at the UN’s Human Rights Council and global conferences around the world about how the bike is a vehicle for human rights and a tool for achieving several of the SDG’s.
August 15, 2021 that all changed when Kabul fell to the Taliban. I began working to evacuate the Afghan cyclists and their family members and continue to do so over one year later. Today cycling is banned, as are all sports for women in Afghanistan, along with education, most jobs outside the home, and traveling without an escort. In just a few short months Afghanistan became the most repressive country for women and girls in the world. The only country to ban sports and secondary education.
My initial pull to Afghanistan was focused on women’s rights and youth culture. But it was buttressed by the desire to understand the truth of what was happening in a country that my own had been ‘at war with’ for forty years through no fault of their own. I wanted to cut through the propaganda of the US media and meet Afghans, see Afghanistan, and find alternatives to support outside of traditional, largely ineffective international aid. I am still fighting that fight. Most recently with the help of lawyers at Hogan Lovells to sumit evidence with Afghan women athletes to the UK Parliament’s gender apartheid inquiry.
I spent four years working in Afghanistan with the first generation of women to ride bikes in Afghanistan from 2012-2016. My work with the Afghan National Women’s Team was internationally recognized with an exhibition in the Canadian Museum of Human Rights, National Geographic Adventure, and a nomination of the national cycling team for a Nobel Peace Prize as part of an overall bid by an Italian committee to nominate the Bike as a Vehicle for Peace. When I started mountain biking in Afghanistan in 2009, I could not find Afghan women or girls riding in Afghanistan anywhere in the country. It was still a cultural taboo and while I heard rumors and stories of Afghan women riding in the south in 1960’s, there were no physical records of it to be found because the Taliban had destroyed so much history when they controlled the country.
From 2013 to 2018 I was producer on the Let Media documentary, Afghan Cycles which documented the first generation of Afghan women to cycle for sport in multiple provinces which premiered at Toronto’s Hot Doc’s Film Festival. I wrote a book Mountain to Mountain about my experiences mountain biking which ended when I met Marjan Seddiqe, the captain of the National Women’s Cycling Team, a handful of young women cycling in Kabul. I assisted in another book written by Hannah Ross, Revolutions, about the history of women’s cycling that included interviews with key leadership in the Afghan women’s cycling movement in Bamyan. And numerous publications and media and short films have documented the women’s cycling revolution during its initial surge of growth 2013-2016.
Thanks to the bravery of Afghan women and girls over one decade, women’s cycling grew from a handful of young women on a cycling team in Kabul to girls’ teams and clubs in multiple provinces, training and racing in road cycling, mountain biking, and BMX. The sport was incredibly dangerous for women and girls and was still considered taboo by conservative Afghans at the time that Kabul fell to the Taliban on August 2021. Today, cycling is banned like all sports for Afghan girls. So is riding bikes, visiting public gardens and national parks, banning freedom of movement and access to the outdoors for women. It is part of the larger gender apartheid that bans women from school and work and traveling without a male escort.
The evacuation of Afghanistan’s first generation of female cyclists and the current cycling teams took place with numerous partners and supporters and was largely financed by crowdfunding. The total number is unknown by through my individual efforts alongside partners over 150 Afghans, mostly cyclists and family members were evacuated and the majority resettled into 10 different countries. In this group includes all the original national team members and cycling leadership from Bamyan and Kabul that I knew and supported from 2013-2016.
Endangered Activism was created as a collaboration with my daughter, Devon when she was 12-years old to mentor and develop her activist passions in wildlife conservation and endangered species. We co-created this project to focus on field research, storytelling, and learn best solutions in local conservation and find creative solutions for storytelling in urban and youth communities that aren’t traditionally tied to conservation. We had the opportunity in her 7th grade year to travel for 14 months, putting our apartment belongings into storage, and diving into field research around the world and soon Devon was interviewing biologists, rangers, scientists, conservation leaders, and researchers in Namibia, Borneo, and Argentina about local solutions to the global problems facing extinction and climate change.
Devon’s focus to give voice to the issue was a graphic novel and streetart projects. We co-wrote the graphic novel, The Rosette, and brought Mariana Prieto on to illustrate. We launched the streetart project, #WhatWeLose with Mexican artist, Diana Garcia as a collaboration and mentorship in Paris, Oxford, and Denver, Colorado.
We filmed everything and now we are reading to create a documentary that focuses on the field research and the use of street art as a way of telling the story through a youth voice to inspire youth activism for wildlife conservation and climate justice.
Climate justice, Palestine, LGBTQIA+ rights, gender equality, abortion rights, Black Lives Matter, and voting rights…. I have protested in the streets in multiple countries exercising my right to assemble, my right to protest, and my freedom of speech. I believe that change comes from the ground up, from community led movements, not from the top down. Governments only listen when the people take action. There are many ways to protest, I choose to engage in several forms, through art, through my humanitarian work, through my writing, through sit ins and demonstrations, and through protest in solidarity with community.