This past winter, Mariah Moneda spent a lot of time taking pictures of her quiet neighborhood — specifically, the bare trees in which birds still decided to build their nests. The idea of leafless trees and creating homes where they are not viable are both foreign to Moneda: born and raised in Arizona, she’s used to lushless, not just in vegetation, but in community, surrounded by other people of color and her family.
That all changed when Moneda moved to Madison to pursue an MFA in Studio Art. In 2022, Moneda left San Diego where she was living and taking care of her elderly grandparents to return to her artistic practice and refine her work.
“My first reaction was like, ‘I can’t do it. I don’t have capacity,’” Moneda recalled. “It was just so guilt-inducing.” Prior to being invited to apply to the MFA program by the artist Tomiko Jones, the young photographer hadn’t even considered graduate school.
Moneda’s decision to uproot her life for grad school — something that she refers to as her own “migration story” — is a split from many things expected of her, both as a Filipino American and a daughter. Her family is made up of three generations of US military personnel, and for a while, this was also her path.
“I was very primed to join the military and everything that came with it,” she said. “I had this ultimate goal of outrank[ing] my dad [in the Air Force]. But then [during] my junior year of high school, I dropped everything to my father’s dismay [because] I was gifted a camera.”
This gift kickstarted years of exploration and experimentation for Moneda. In her remaining time in high school, she turned to broadcast journalism, then attended college at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism. But soon after starting the program, she grew uncomfortable with its rigidity.
“For me ,that was really difficult, because it felt too close to the rigidity of this thing that I was running away from, which was the military,” she said. She then pursued a Film & Media degree, and while this brought her closer to her passions, something still wasn’t quite right. She wasn’t collaborating as much with other filmmakers as she wanted.
Instead, in her free time, she spent a lot of time doing solo photo expeditions, throwing herself into commercial photography for the local modeling and fashion scenes. Soon enough, she found herself wanting more.
“[When] I switched to photography, that’s where my life completely pivoted,” she explained. “I felt like, ‘This is where I’m supposed to be, in the fine art world.’”
Moneda’s first subjects were her family, in part because of their proximity to her. She began photographing her grandparents, her brother, and her parents, leaning into capturing the immigrant experience.
These pictures became a way of bridging her experience to that of her relatives of older generations.
“I was raised by all of these immigrants [but] I’m living this very American lifestyle,” she explained. “I actually envision myself as a little hyphen, [an] in between.”