Ajax began making sculptures at the age of 16 at Skidmore College. She has a minor in art from Skidmore and majored in Middle Eastern Politics, which lead her to study both sculpture and conflict resolution as the American University in Cairo in 2003 and 2004. After college, she pursued a career in journalism working in Egypt, Sudan, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Lebanon and Colombia while making installation sculptures and tableau photographs in her free time.
In 2008, she began working in the editorial department at the Italian arts and culture magazine Colors. That year, her photographs were included in the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art’s Colorado Artists Group Exhibition. In 2009, several of her large format photographs of mutating landscapes were included in the Tang Museum’s Skidmore alumni group exhibition. In the fall of 2009, she began a master’s degree that combined art and anthropology at Harvard University where she took classes in critical studies, anthropology and studio art. She worked with the Harvard Public Art Initiative in the spring of 2010, which resulted in the installation of a Myanmar inspired, police state, border crossing being erected at the entrance to Harvard’s main campus.
In March of 2010, she received a National Geographic Young Explorer’s Grant for a project on climate change in Eastern Sudan. That project took close to a year and, by its completion, Ajax was committed to continuing to work in East Africa. She was still making sculptural installation work in her spare time and now she began to look around her at the materials available in Kenya and Sudan. Inspired by the System D economy she saw flourishing there, she started using found and recycled objects and construction methods that emphasized the fact that objects were handmade.
She returned to the United States in 2012 and began taking classes in sculpture at Anderson Ranch in Snowmass, Colorado. She found a studio in the wilderness outside of Aspen and started creating
sculptural installations about the environment, philosophy and the future of mankind. In 2013, she created the idols for two opposing futuristic tribes, The Petrolyphic and Solarglyphic people, reflective of dystopic and utopic future societies. In the spring of 2014, she returned to Kenya where she built a three-meter tall pyramid from 3000 plastic water bottles salvaged from local beaches.
Between 2011 and 2015 she worked with a number of different artists including Richard Prince, J. Morgan Puett, Mare Liberum and Abdulnasser Gharem on projects and exhibitions. The Mare Liberum, Open Seas project was written up in The Wall Street Journal in 2012, her work with Richard Prince was published in Purple Magazine in January 2013, and the Gharem Studios Exhibition project was recently published in Art in America and The Guardian.
In the summer of 2015, the Gonzo Gallery in Aspen offered her a solo show. She created forty new works for that show which was exhibited in February of 2016. The show was well received, and most of the pieces were sold into private collections.
In February of 2017, she participated in the Lamu Arts Festival in Lamu, Kenya. That fall, she worked with newly arrived DACA students from Basalt High School to create a mural entitled Home. In July of 2018, she had her second solo show at Skye Gallery entitled The Palace of The Beast. That fall, she began working on her first feature length film project, Freak Power: The Ballot Or The Bomb which was released in October of 2020. She wrote her first libretto for an opera entitled Crude Capital by composer Michael Lanci in 2019, which was performed at National Sawdust in Brooklyn by the Beth Morrison Project. Her third solo show, Playtime! was exhibited at the Gonzo Gallery in the summer of 2020.
Besides her work as an artist and filmmaker, Ajax is engaged in community activism with artists and environmentalists in Kenya, Sudan, Greece and the US through her climate and community arts project: Earth Force Climate Command.