Social practice

Art as a way of organizing relation.

My social practice creates situations in which people write, make, gather, publish, remember, eat, witness, and imagine together. The social structure is not merely the setting for the work; it is part of the form.

A working proposition

The container is part of the artwork.

Who is invited, what is possible, how attention is held, who retains authority over what is shared, and what remains afterward all belong to the work. A workshop, meal, reading, publication, exhibition, or recurring group can be a structure for rehearsing another kind of public life.

Selected projects

Long-duration work, public witness, and gathering.

2024–present · Cunningham Township / UCIMC

Winter Writers / Homecoming

Arts-based writing developed with people affected by housing insecurity, violence, grief, disability, addiction, and social isolation. Workshops extend into chapbooks, readings, collective making, and participant leadership.

2024–present · grief writing / community

The Art of Loss

Facilitated writing through grief and loss, developed as an ongoing community practice through Amherst Writers & Artists and the Power of Story program.

2024 · Urbana

Coming Home

A public exhibition and poetry reading about being housed and unhoused, home, welcome and exclusion, bodies, buildings, and families, curated in partnership with the Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center.

2006–present · experimental pedagogy / public practice

Designing social forms

Teaching, facilitation, immersive programs, and collaborative inquiry developed with the School for Designing a Society and related community settings.

2023–present · Urbana

Sunday Night Spaghetti Dinner and Salon 

Recurring meals and gatherings organized around hospitality, loneliness, disability access, queer belonging, mutual support, conversation, and the social infrastructure of staying connected.

2019–present · School for Designing a Society / UCIMC

Community Creativity Workshops

Participatory writing, art, conversation, zines, and experimental pedagogy carried across community spaces and institutional partnerships.

2012 / 2018 · site-specific exhibitions and performance

House and Home / The Work We Do While Doing Our Work

Collaborative exhibitions in Urbana that treated the house, installation, participants, hosting, performance, and the conditions of encounter as part of the work. Documentation from the 2018 project includes paper installations, collective tethering with rope, exhibition books and zines, and the recurring “Not My Dissertation” archive of medical, artistic, and scholarly materials.

2020–present · online /community based

Writing for Resiliency and Recovery

A sustained writing community in which creative attention, optional sharing, affirmative response, and long-term relation are treated as both method and form.

The work is collaborative by design. Credit, consent, role, context, access, and the right not to disclose are part of the artistic and ethical structure.