FIFTEEN is a long-term photographic project that begins with the quinceañera in Colombia and expands toward a broader investigation of how womanhood is imagined, performed and passed on across cultures.

What does it mean to become a woman?

Long before we are able to define it for ourselves, we encounter images of what a woman is supposed to look like, how she should behave, what she should desire and how she should be seen.

These ideas reach us through family, culture, religion, media, beauty, fashion and the people around us.

Repeated over time, they can begin to feel natural, even when they are constructed.

I am interested in how womanhood is produced: how we learn an idea of what a woman is, how we encounter it through images and gestures, and how these ideas become part of the way we understand ourselves.

My own experience of moving between different cultural environments has made me attentive to the ways images of

womanhood change from one context to another. This has led me to look beyond the quinceañera and ask how different societies mark, imagine or leave unmarked the transition toward womanhood.

Through the project, I want to explore the space between the woman we are taught to imagine, the woman we learn to perform, and the woman we might eventually choose to become.