New Natives are a group of portraits of aspiring male models of mixed ethnicity and race from Hawaii. The subjects are scouted from New York through social media and photographed in their local terrain around the metropolis of Honolulu. Drawing from Hawaii’s royal history as well as its Eastern and Western influences, this series introduces visions of masculinity, identity, and sexuality, which upend conventional hegemony on multiple registers.

Dream Factory / 夢ファクトリー (2007-2011) is a visual exploration of the promises and shortcomings of postwar Japan as it reflects and reinterprets the American Dream. These photographs are, without a doubt, about Japan, yet they are equally about the contemporary conditions that connect citizens of all consumerist societies. Japan, which enjoyed remarkable benefits by subscribing to American economic principles during times of prosperity, has suffered equally staggering repercussions due to fiscal hardships of the last 20 years. The recent shifts in Japan’s political leadership, the most notable changes in Japan since the end of World War II, punctuate this era and highlight the impact of the latest financial crisis. Dream Factory explores Japan, on the brink of a major transition as it is eclipsed by China in terms of global economics. By looking closely at Japan at this moment of change, this series exposes both the dazzling surface and complicated underbelly of the larger capitalist world, which Japan so powerfully magnifies.

Interior Portraits (1999-2008) depicts fellow artists at homes to investigate how they define themselves, and are defined, by the places they inhabit, the clothes they wear, the rituals they perform, and the objects that surround them. These pictures highlight everyday desires, both primal and prescribed, and consider what individuals long for after they have acted on, and fulfilled, their habituated wishes.

Isaac (2003-present) is an ongoing series of portraits about time, place, perception, and desire. Unlike Georgia (Alfred Stiegitz), Eleanor (Harry Callahan), Edith (Emmet Gowin), and Maria (Lee Friedlander), Isaac, a man, is the subject of this photographic series. This project channels a broader history of the figure in art by confronting the photographic paradigm of woman as muse over the last century.

Ben (2000-2001, 2011) presents a solitary figure playing dress-up in his hermetic world of narcissism, posturing, and mirrors. Inspired by Frank Wedekind’s Springs Awakening and Jean Baudrillard’s Ecstasy of Communication, this series casts the viewer as a privileged voyeur, who witnesses the flowering of Ben's adulthood desire and his changing relationship to the domestic spaces of his adolescence.

Nan (1995-2007) is a visual diary of the golden years of Maida’s maternal grandmother. Born Annunziata in 1920 -- but known by her Americanized name, Nancy -- Nan, who was raised to be a 1950's homemaker, embodies the complexities and contradictions of the postwar America woman. Inspired by Sirkian melodramas, this series relishes in the veneer of American prosperity while illuminating the underbelly of growing old in a culture of youth, beauty, and consumption.

Local Service (1999 - present) documents small, independent companies and mom-and-pop shops across the United States in the age of big-box stores, online retail, and billion-dollar corporations.