Things I’ve Made

Co-Founder · Branding, communications & creative direction

After finishing my death midwifery apprenticeship, I wanted to find the other death workers in DC — the ones thinking about holistic approaches to life and death, about systems and structures, about what it means to do this work in this city, in this moment. I knew they were out there, but I just couldn't quite figure out where they were gathering.

I began to dream up a clubhouse — a hub. A place for death workers to find each other, collaborate, and figure it out together. I found a collaborator in Laura Lyster-Mensh, our favorite Death Doula in Residence at the Historic Congressional Cemetery, and together, we co-founded The DC Death Collective.

Now I lead its branding, communications, newsletter, and creative programming — the connective tissue, dreaming up events, writing the words, making sure the whole thing feels like itself. We’re beefing up with a steering committee, thirty members, a growing directory, and an interdisciplinary community reimagining how we approach living, dying, and caring for one another in the DMV.

→ Visit thedcdeathcollective.org

Solo researcher, producer & exhibition designer · Columbia University MA thesis

When I went to Western North Carolina to ask how a physical geography shapes how you live and who you become, the question shifted. I needed to ask something else: what does it mean to die here? The result was a manifold project: a choose-your-own-adventure oral history concept album and a pop-up listening bar where strangers sat with the voices of Hot Springs, NC; a two part audio documentary; and an on-going oral history program that lives in Madison County and with StoryCorps + The Library of Congress.

→ Listen to part of it here

Co-producer · Oral history podcast series

My best friend + collaborator were handed decades of oral history archives and told: make something. Eight episodes, hosted by lead NPS oral historian Luann Jones, about the people who take care of America's parks — search and rescue rangers, wilderness managers, cartographers, interpreters. Winner of the Society for History in the Federal Government Excellence in New Media Award, 2021.

→ Listen here

Writer & researcher — Grim & Mild Entertainment, INC

The American sideshow built its spectacle on real people — people whose stories were deliberately obscured, whose interiority was stripped away so they could be turned into a commodity. We wanted to dig into the archives and reanimate each life.

Sideshow is a narrative podcast series I wrote and researched for Grim & Mild Entertainment, traveling across time and geography to understand how this institution came to exist — and what it left behind. It was created in collaboration with Taylor Hagerdorn and Sam Alberty, narrated by Aaron Mahnke.

It was collaborative institutional work — not mine alone. But the question underneath it is one I keep returning to everywhere: whose stories get told, and whose get buried.

I sadly didn’t get to attend the Sideshow School at Coney Island in the process of making this show, ut never say never.

→ Listen to Sideshow