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Perception + Relation
How do we become available to one another?
My workshops, social practice, teaching, facilitation, and community work ask what allows one life to become perceptible to another. Attention, witness, trust, embodiment, repetition, and shared practice are not merely settings for the work; they are part of its form.
Perception as practice
Attention is not neutral. It can also be offered as care.
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. I use writing, listening, making, shared meals, repetition, embodied attention, and collective authorship to build situations in which people can become more perceptible to one another. Over time I have come to think of these repeated structures as relational infrastructures: forms through which recognition, connection, and participation can circulate.
Practices + projects
Workshops, gatherings, witness, and long-duration relation.
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.
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.
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.
Designing social forms
Teaching, facilitation, immersive programs, and collaborative inquiry developed with the School for Designing a Society and related community settings.
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.
Community Creativity Workshops
Participatory writing, art, conversation, zines, and experimental pedagogy carried across community spaces and institutional partnerships.
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.
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.