I’m Moni. I grew up in northern Mexico, and after earning my degree in business, I moved to California to work in museums, trying to get closer to an artistic calling I hadn’t fully figured out yet. 

Over the years, I discovered a passion for photography, anthropology, history and anything creative, really. Every penny I saved went into traveling, and my travels became increasingly focused on learning more about the rich diversity of the cultures I was encountering and their history. 

This led me to photographing the making of crafts, and spent many evenings working with wood, clay, wool, metals, making natural dyes, mezcal, rakija, arepas, tamales, rugs and so on.

I became captivated, and some of the most transformative moments in my life happened abroad: making lavash under a thunderstorm in a monastery in the Armenian mountains, witnessing a peaceful overthrowing of a national government, spending the evening eating and drinking in a cemetery surrounded by musicians in a Zapotec village, and talking to survivors of the Balkan wars.

I decided to create photographic collections documenting traditional crafts across Japan, the Balkans and Latin America - until the world stopped.