Researcher · educator · facilitator · social practice artist
I am interested in what allows people to remain human with one another.
I work under conditions that damage belonging—trauma, displacement, homelessness, institutional violence, precarity, and isolation—and with the practices through which people reconstruct home, narrative, relationship, and collective life.
The connective tissue
My method is not simply to study those processes. I build situations in which they can happen: workshops, meals, exhibitions, houses, writing groups, archives, temporary communities, and collective books.
Areas of practice
One practice, several forms
Research & organizational learning
Qualitative and mixed-methods inquiry, program evaluation, and careful study of how people experience institutions, leadership, care, and change.
Writing & facilitation
Trauma-responsive and disability-informed writing spaces where people make meaning, develop craft, and participate without coercion.
Social practice
Public and community-based work that uses art, gathering, publication, and shared inquiry to create forms of belonging.
Writing, film & book arts
Scholarship and creative work across poetry, essays, handmade books, exhibitions, performance, image, and film.
Selected contexts
Research, teaching, facilitation, and public work across institutions and communities.
Recent and ongoing work includes UCLA DataX and Gender Studies, the University of Michigan’s Barger Leadership Institute, Amherst Writers & Artists, Cunningham Township, the Fetzer Institute, and community-based arts and public programs. Explore the project archive → View the professional record →
Current work
Research brought into public practice
Community program · Urbana
Homecoming: Writing, Making, Belonging
A trauma-responsive arts and writing program developed with Cunningham Township for people navigating housing and financial insecurity, grief, disability, addiction, and social isolation.
Book in progress
Trauma Diaspora
A book project on trauma, archives, embodiment, and the material and social practices through which people live with what cannot simply be repaired or left behind.
Public work · 2025–2026
Care, survival & collective life
Recent work includes Care Beyond Institutions at SPSSI, Homecoming: Writing, Making, Belonging with Cunningham Township, ongoing Art of Loss and resiliency writing communities, curriculum and program development, and continued work on Trauma Diaspora.
Work together