SESSION TITLE: Noria Grief Café
SESSION DATE:
Saturday, October 26th (in-person) & Wednesday, October 30th (online)

Aimee Wilson (they / them) is visionary architect, executive director and steward of Únashay Sanctuary. Music is their primary language, having written, performed and recorded two albums. They have served under many roles, as musician, singer, writer, social worker, organizer and fundraiser for houseless women/ queer community in Philadelphia, waitress, group facilitator and more. After much intimate experience with loss, and decades of work within a system that doesn’t take care of the grieving, Aimee was moved to summon únashay. They dwell in New Mexico with wolf kin and chosen family, tending the sanctuary and writing music.

Learn more about Aimee and Únashay here. 

SESSION TITLE: I’m Not Dead Yet!
SESSION DATE: Saturday, November 2nd

Alex W. Rodríguez (he / him) is a left-handed writer, organizer, educator, and trombonist working at the confluences of music, spirituality, and social transformation. Most recently, this led him to co-found Mirlo, an online platform for supporting and sustaining creative musicians; he also teaches courses on jazz, electronic, and popular music at Wellesley College. Previously, he co-founded Catalyst Cooperative Healing, a mental health worker cooperative, and is a certified teacher in Deep Listening. He holds a PhD in Ethnomusicology from UCLA, where his research focused on jazz clubs and the communities that sustain them in California, Chile, and Siberia. His writing has appeared in Geez Magazine, Lion’s Roar, NPR Music, LA Weekly, and the Newark Star-Ledger. He has been traveling in ten circles since the spring of 2020, when he joined the organizing team for the Wilds Beyond Climate Justice. The bizarre and inspired combination of care, silliness, earnest experimentalism, and revolutionary struggle that he has found here has compelled him to stick around for the foreseeable future.

Learn more about Alex here.

SESSION TITLE: Grief Tending at the Crossroads
SESSION DATE: Wednesday, October 30th

Alexis Ioannou is an unlearning psychotherapist and ritualist. His practice focuses on encouraging conversations between body awareness and imaginative / intuitive sensing and sits at the crossroads of creative – expressive arts, animist/relational practice, contemplative practice and somatic trauma therapy. He meets people as they move through profound life transitions, as they unlearn dominant culture ways of being, becoming and loving, and contend with the realities of grief, death and dying. He is born in Greece and his ancestors are from the Balkan peninsula, the Black Sea, and the Central and Eastern Mediterranean.

Learn more about Alexi here.

SESSION TITLE: Que retumbe en sus centros la Tierra: Our Monsters’ Pulse
SESSION DATE: Wednesday, October 30th

Aline Shkurovich was born in Mexico City in 1977. She’s a weaver of human relationships and networks, a free and engaged spirit. Founder and Director of LILHA Art Residency in San Pancho Nayarit and mother to Alaia. She is a multidisciplinary artist focusing on the activating potential of socially engaged art practices, particularly the intersection of art, climate response. the more-than-human and ancestral knowledge. Her artistic practice includes photography, video, sound, sculpture, mixed media and curatorial work. She lives and works in San Pancho, Nayarit, a coastal town on the Pacific Ocean. She has exhibited in solo and group shows internationally but is fully committed to continuing to dismantle the rigid framework and limitations of art within institutions and the commercial scene as she finds her practice in engaging in collaborative and reciprocal relationships. A practitioner and seeker of gift-economies and unknown ways of being. As a human, accepting her condition of an eternal apprentice.

Learn more about Aline here and here.

SESSION TITLE: The Monster in Black Skin Returns The Love 
SESSION DATE: Friday, November 1st

Hallelujah Anasuya Isaacs is “The Mystic Midwife” who provides a courageous space for individuals to Re:Birth themselves into sovereign wholeness and holiness. She devises experiential workshops that delve into the realm of Oneness across different cultures, races, and religions, facilitated through the mediums of painting, words, theater, and sacred rituals to heal trauma and dismantle systemic oppression. Working across the globe, Anasuya, curates unique “Healing the Sisterhood: Healing the Divide between Black and White Women” to address the first core wound by Patriarchy, aimed at reinstating women to their conscious embodied power, anchored in the Black Madonna archetype of the Divine Feminine. Anasuya, a published author and poet, earned her B.A. in International Relations and Creative Writing from Oberlin College. She also studied at the Sorbonne: Université de Paris, and is bilingual in English and French. Anasuya’s rich life experience includes residing in six countries and studying with mystics across 24 countries in her pursuit of understanding the Feminine Face of the Divine. She is a respected speaker and workshop leader on the subject of “The Black Madonna: The Mother Who Answers,” imparting wisdom and guiding others in this deep spiritual journey.

SESSION TITLE: The Deathbed
SESSION DATE: Thursday, October 31st 

Angela Silva Mendes believes that self-work, based on embodied awareness, is a crucial vehicle for social justice. Her diverse academic background includes bachelor’s degrees in education, communication theories, and a master’s in international affairs. Guided by her desire to serve and her thirst for meaning, Angela also holds a range of personal development certificates including neurolinguistics programming, mindfulness, and coaching. Honoring her African heritage, Angela named her practice Upanji, meaning energy, a space of acceptance, holding what arises, and integration. With work experience in Europe, Africa, and the USA, Angela coaches, facilitates, and teaches internationally through individual sessions, workshops, and talks.

Learn more about Angela here.

SESSION TITLE: The Shape of Grief: An Embodied Journey through Art-Making
SESSION DATE: Saturday, November 2nd 

Anoushka Kumar is a queer flower child. Often found walking barefoot and conversing with cats and spiders and other creatures, she bridges artistic expression with healing as a trauma-informed expressive arts therapy practitioner. Anoushka lives in a realm of vibrant images and sounds, where words sometimes fall short, but where the language of the soul speaks volumes. She also sings, writes songs, and expresses herself through movement, intuitive art-making, and other forms of creative expression. Her recent journey has been dedicated to exploring the expressive arts deeper through archetypes, tarot, dreams, and the psyche, guided by Jungian depth work and an inquiry into the shadow and collective unconscious. She works with individuals facing mental health challenges amd offers workshops on inner child healing, women’s empowerment, creative expression, and self-regulation. She aspires to embody the person she longed for as a child – a beacon of empathy and understanding in a world that needs more of both.

Learn more about Anoushka here.

SESSION TITLE: {{IN PROGRESS}}
SESSION DATE: Thursday, October 31st 

A widely celebrated international speaker, posthumanist thinker, poet, teacher, trans-public intellectual, essayist, and author of two books, Bayo Akomolafe is the Founder of The Emergence Network and convener of the course-festival ‘We Will Dance with Mountains’, as well as concepts such as “postactivism”, “ontofugitivity”, and \cracks\. Bayo is awkward in public spaces – especially where there’s gum littering the streets. He compulsively performs a strange ‘crustacean’-like walk when he spots the “toxically irradiated blob-like things” tattooing the surfaces of curbs and corners – a gesture he theorizes as potentially emancipatory to the carcerality of neurotypical citizenry.

Learn more about Báyò here.

SESSION TITLE: Dragons in the Belly
SESSION DATE: Wednesday, October 30th (online)
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SESSION TITLE: The Beasts are Born
SESSION DATE: Friday November 1 – Saturday, November 2nd

Brae Weil-Sisk (they/them) is owner of Embody Alchemy, a practice of Dynamic Embodiment® and transformative healing through somatic movement, hands on therapies, plant medicine journeys and creative process. Brae is a founding member of Radical Healing Arts Cooperative and co-director of Chico Body-Wise Collective in Chico, CA. They are a physical theater artist, a visual artist and mask maker practicing the alchemy of transformative healing through ritual, ceremony, art and laughter. In recent years they have re-engaged with their roots in physical theater and clowning, incorporating somatic and movement theater forms, including mask making. Using movement, vocal expression and mask performance to amplify and explore the physical densities and pain of our latent traumas, wounds, griefs and angersLearn more about.

Learn more about Brae here, here and here.

SESSION TITLE: Creative Practices of Revolutionary Aliveness
SESSION DATE: Thursday, October 31st

Bridget Quinn is an artist, activist, and publisher, living in Detroit – Waawiyatanong. Often working collaboratively under the moniker AWE society, she creates objects, images, performances and publications that facilitate sensual surrealist connections with our social ecologies and the reclamation of the sacred field of our attention. She sings with friends and strangers in stormwater tunnels, communes with fossils living in concrete and invites you to join her in space and time or on the printed page with your bag of realities. Bridget’s cultural work has been exhibited nationally and has been featured in Hyperallergic, Detroit Research and The New York Times. Bridget is co-facilitating the session, Creative Practices of Revolutionary Aliveness with Owólabi Aboyade.

Learn more about Bridget here, here and support The A.W.E. Society on Patreon here.

SESSION TITLE: Making Sanctuary with Hermit Crabs
SESSION DATE: Saturday, November 2nd

Charlotte Hankin is an experienced international educator with 23 years experience living and learning in the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia, Thailand and currently, Bali, Indonesia. As co-founder of Coconut Thinking, Charlotte works as an educational consultant in sustainability education and is a PhD researcher in the Department of Education, University of Bath. Her doctoral inquiry explores animal-child relations to consider how international schools might shift from human-exceptionalism to more regenerative pedagogical practices. Charlotte employs posthumanist and feminist materialist theories and practices to co-create research with animals and children.

Learn more about Charlotte here.

SESSION TITLE: Becoming Multiple
SESSION DATE: Thursday, October 31st & Saturday, November 2nd (two parts) 

Camille Courier and Laura Winn are an arts-based research duo exploring relationships between people and other-than-human agencies. Passionate about ecology, drawing, regenerative thinking, feminism and learning, the long-standing duo come together to think, write and propose interactive learning and research projects. Camille Courier is a visual artist, researcher and teacher who works with traditional and digital drawing mediums, creating large format works, often in situ. She is based with her French/ Japanese family and cat in Montreal, Canada. Laura Winn is a learning facilitator for regenerative development and a systems change coach, actively involved in translating across anglophone and francophone spheres. She is based in Montpellier, France with her New Zealand/British/French family. 

SESSION TITLE: Grief Tending at the Crossroads
SESSION DATE: Wednesday, October 30th

Dita is a rewilder of self, of land and of people. She’s in the long process of softening years of scientific knowledge to make space for a wisdom that can only come from a direct conversation with nature, of which we’re inextricable part. Dita worked on evolutionary ecology of conflict for a couple of decades until the need to break free from the Story of Business as Usual and take part in land regeneration opened up space for her passion of working with and for the soil. Since then, she’s been a nomad and a gift-economy activist. She’s been practicing and studying somatic approaches to trauma and interrelational dynamics for the last two decades, deepening work on whole-nervous-system coherence and its applications in communication and conflict transformation. She’s an Apprentice to the Art of Tending Grief and happiest with a wheelbarrow and a story, a drum and a shared silence, and eager to deepen her dancing with the scythe.

Learn more about Dita here.

SESSION TITLE: Grief Rave
SESSION DATE: Wednesday, October 30th 

DJ Alma ∞ Omega (aka Maegan Melissa Gorbett) dedicates her life’s work to weaving the succulent strands of Dance, Music, Embodiment, Transformation, Connection & Community as an offering of joy & purpose. Her drive is to serve the (collective / individual) healing of the past, help in midwifing the emergent-juicy-present of transformative-cultures, all while keeping in mind the wider vision, for future generations to come.

Learn more about Alma here, here and here. 

SESSION TITLE: Socio-Somatic Monstrous Co-Presence
SESSION DATE: Thursday, October 31st

Doerte Weig’s fascination is to in-earth how human physicality relates to socio-political transformation and ecological awareness. In her work, she combines anthropology, artistic research-creation, dance and somatics. Doerte moves with the notion of socio-somatics, referring to our ancestors’ egalitarian practices of keeping power circulating as part of ecosystemic thinking-doing. For Doerte, nurturing this kind of ecosomatic aliveness speaks to issues around human and planetary healing, (re)generative cultures, relational intelligence and decolonial approaches to power.

Learn more about Doerte here.

SESSION TITLE: Dragons in the Belly
SESSION DATE: Wednesday, October 30th (online)
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SESSION TITLE: The Beasts are Born
SESSION DATE: Friday November 1 – Saturday, November 2nd

Emma (she/her) is a personal growth and embodiment coach with a Masters in Psychology, infusing mental health strategies with embodiment practices. She believes in the power of art, play, human connection and nervous system support to enhance growth and vitality. Emma helps folks access their internal knowledge, strengthen trust in themselves, create healthy boundaries and collect the tools they need to navigate their particular life paths. Emma is a creative artist and expressive arts facilitator and a founding member of Radical Healing Arts Cooperative and co-director of Chico Body-Wise Collective. In particular, she is excited to explore the practice of using movement theater forms of the grotesque and bouffon, as amplified forms of expression to free life force energy and explore through the art of becoming a monster.

Learn more about Emma here.

SESSION TITLE: Eating Love
SESSION DATE: Friday, November 1st 

Elizabeth Chapin’s paintings explore the intimacy of bodies (human, arboreal, and vegetal) as expansive environments – intra-connected, both containing and leaking within each other. This intimacy dissolves the illusion of gaze – of artist/subject and subject/viewer. Chapin sees archetype and myth as a way of holding our seemingly distinct experiences and bodies in the thicker flow of everything. Social media, the religion of identity, and a modern mythology perpetuates and broadcasts “self”, offering playful creativity, but also exile, distorting what it means to be connected, while maintaining systems of separateness. Chapin responds to these ideas with restless paintings that become bodies, tumble off the wall, fold into themselves, into you and into each other, paintings co-becoming.

Learn more about Elizabeth here and here.

SESSION TITLE: Death Through the Māori Lens
SESSION DATE: Sunday, November 3rd

Erihapeti “Eri” is a Māori teacher, healer and artist from Aotearoa, New Zealand. As a kaitiaki tohorā (keeper of whales) and death walker of her rohe (community), she brings a lifetime of practical wisdom and rituals to share. Her fine art practice spans over three decades, and her carvings and prints featured in global exhibitions. She currently specializes in intricate works on paper and sacred jewelry, where she draws inspiration from her Māori heritage and spiritual traditions.

Learn more about Eri here.

SESSION TITLE: Transitional Momentum for Ecological Grief
SESSION DATE: Saturday, November 2nd

Frederike Doffin combines movement practices with experiences she gathers when gardening and attuning to the plant realm. She is interested in the interweaving of socio-ecological issues with artistic practices and in performative formats that invite an immersive sensory experience. She studied Movement, Mind and Ecology and works as a Shiatsu practitioner. anisa sima is a friend, child, sibling, shapeshifter, and goofball whose emergent praxis of “fielding imaginative futures through presence” is guided by acts of radical care, tenderness, and subversive failure. Alongside their soma-poetic practices, anisa engages with co-creative facilitation as a radical craft through their work as a production coordinator, editor, and community weaver across various projects and fields. Manuel Lindner works as a dancer and carpenter in Berlin. He finds joy in communing with the minute energies in woodwork and in body based thinking.

Learn more about the Transitional Momentum for Ecological Grief here.

SESSION TITLE: Envision without Boundaries
SESSION DATE: Saturday, November 2nd

Harshinee Rajkumar is an illustrator and muralist based in Bangalore, India. Their primary interest lies in the nuance of human expression with a special interest in walking through parks. With their practice rooted in multi-media exploration, they have facilitated formal and informal sessions of artistic learning. They tell stories through comics, zines and illustrations which focus on the intersection of queerness, mental wellness, inclusion and the diversity of human experience. They have illustrated books which share global perspectives and personal narratives and have facilitated holistic art workshops with the Melton Foundation for diverse audiences. They aim to find exciting ways to share stories and eventually become a puppet master.

Learn more about Harshinee here.

SESSION TITLE: Fugitive Embodiments
SESSION DATE: Sunday, November 2nd 

IWTOTH (Improvising with the Other-than-Human) is a raggle-taggle of international assemblages who have been gathering underground since 2019. They have been exploring cripkult and welcoming story, poetry, dance & media arts to inhabit their communal imaginarium. IWTOTH is a relational bone structure which nourishes creative experiments, cultural practice, care & connection. It infuses the world with inspirational vitality and allows for generative creative collaborations with many. Be they humans, rivers, images, story, poetry, instruments, sounds, trees, birds & ancestors of both the human & other-than-human variety, all can be explored. You too can explore their multi modal artifacts relating to #cripkult, disability, and ableism here. And stay in the loop with their activities via the IWTOTH website here. 

Craig Slee is a disabled writer, crip storyteller, consultant & theorist.

Learn more about Craig here.

SESSION TITLE: Becoming Janitor
SESSION DATE: Thursday, October 31st 

Jiordi (aka janus) is a California State-certified Burn Boss of Northern Mexican and Jewish descent. He has worked with ten for the past six years and offered creative support to We Will Dance with Mountains in 2021 and 2023. Jiordi is currently co-stewarding land and programming for disaster-companionship at the School for Inclement Weather in Kashia Territory, Northern CA. His current season of work is focused on protocols surrounding the coordination and use of fire in California, in partnership with The Kashia Pomo Cultural Department, the Good Fire Alliance and Summer of Protocols.

Learn more about Jiordi here.

SESSION TITLE: What is Water Trying to Tell Us?
SESSION DATE: Friday, November 1st

Joe Culhane is co-founder of the Institute of Relational Being (IRB). He has a Masters Degree in Engaged Ecology from Schumacher College and is a collaborative eco-generalist, folk herbalist, proud father of two, and in a loving relationship with his partner for over a decade. He balances these while weaving together his leadership, communications, organizing and social/climate justice work in innovative and engaging ways. Joe’s background includes consulting, podcasting/radio, journalism, business management, event and concert organizing, public speaking, facilitation, and more.

Learn more about Joe and the Institute of Relational Being here, here and here.

SESSION TITLE: Deepavali Celebration through Boomadevi Sathyabama
SESSION DATE: Saturday, November 2nd 

The Karthik family consists of Pam, Karthik & 10 year old twins, Dharma and Sathya. The family blends together energy work, animistic practices, herbalism, homeschooling/unschooling, software industry, chess, soccer, naturalist studies, earth science, cooking whole foods, discussions on mycelium and microbiomes. At the time of writing this, they are traveling across the United States & Canada while listening to & unfolding the layers of the Mahabharata and its uncomfortable violent complexities. Dharma, Sathya, Karthik and Pam love documentaries, snuggling, eating, laughing, watching nature, and napping – in no particular order… except the napping & eating part: both always come first!

SESSION TITLE: Theater Eats Monster
SESSION DATE: Saturday, November 2nd

Kate’s work as a Somatic Scribe and cultural worker is in service to social ecologies knowing themselves intimately. Their work uses body, story, image and ancestral memory to activate the wisdom in a collective towards decolonial healing. Kate is a performance artist and applied theater maker, a writer and convener of transnational conversations about queer pedagogy, and member of a queer, radical unschooling family living on Maskoke territory.

Learn more about Kate here and here.

SESSION TITLE: Muck, Mire and Matterings: Daily Metabolizations
SESSION DATE: Wednesday, October 30th | Thursday, October 31st | Friday, November 1st | Saturday, November 2nd

Krista Dragomer is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist working in visual art and sound. She creates artworks, workshops and participatory experiences, often in collaboration with new media artists, musicians, writers, speakers and researchers in the biological sciences and cultural studies. Krista is interested in the ways that sensory encounters with art can offer different approaches to public thought and has presented art and workshops in academic conferences, art and science museums, concert venues, public parks, storefronts, DIY artist-run spaces, podcasts, and galleries.

Learn more about Krista here and here. 

SESSION TITLE: Buried Alive: A Practice for Coming Apart
SESSION DATE: Thursday, October 31st & Saturday, November 2nd (two parts)

Beatrice Marovich is a writer, professor, and archaeologist of the imagination. She writes about more-than-human worlds, and works in the field of religious studies and theology. She is the author of Sister Death: Political Theologies for Living and Dying. Learn more about Beatrice here and here. Krista Dragomer is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist working in visual art and sound. She creates artworks, workshops and participatory experiences, often in collaboration with new media artists, musicians, writers, speakers and researchers in the biological sciences and cultural studies. Krista is interested in the ways that sensory encounters with art can offer different approaches to public thought. Learn more about Krista here and here. Beatrice and Krista Dragomer have been collaborating for more than ten years. Their projects range from speculative fiction and essays to exhibitions, audio works, presentations, and co-teaching engagements. Beatrice’s book, Sister Death includes artwork by Krista Dragomer created over the many years of their collaborative friendship.

SESSION TITLE: Geographies of Faith | Geografías de fe
SESSION DATE: Thursday, October 31st

Mischievous, neuroatypical shaman, guardian of spaces of mourning and encounter, Laura gravitates towards the worlds of choreography, performing arts, somatics, and co-active coaching. For 25 years he has been developing an artistic relational practice, in the context of a hybrid art, crossed by postmodern dance, performance and video art, expanding the possibilities of choreography towards open hybrid formats, generating haptic relationships with spectators. Ideokinetica, is a somatic and performing art laboratory she has been cutivating for 15 years.

Learn more about Laura here, here and here.

SESSION TITLE: Beyond Hope: Moving Through The Polycrisis With Heart
SESSION DATE: Friday, November 1st

LaUra Schmidt is the founder of the Good Grief Network. She is a lifelong student, curator, and teacher of personal and collective resilience practices. LaUra holds a BS in Environmental Studies, Biology, and Religious Studies and an MS in Environmental Humanities. LaUra has earned certificates in “Integrative Somatic Trauma Therapy” and “Climate Psychology.” Check out LaUra’s book How to Live in a Chaotic Climate: 10 Steps to Reconnect with Ourselves, Our Communities, and Our Planet.

Learn more about LaUra here, here and here, and you can buy her book here.

SESSION TITLE: Monsters Circle
SESSION DATE: Wednesday, October 30th (in-person) | Friday, November 1st (online)

Laureline Simon is the founder and executive director of One Resilient Earth, a non-profit dedicated to growing climate-resilience in transformative and regenerative ways. The organization offers transdisciplinary learning experiences focusing on climate resilience, regeneration and inner/outer transformation to young adults and sustainability professionals, as well as circles to navigate climate emotions. It feeds an online magazine to explore new narratives with artists, scientists and Indigenous knowledge holders, as well as co-designs and supports projects with climate-vulnerable communities. Before serving One Resilient Earth, Laureline supported the international climate negotiations, focusing on adaptation and loss and damage, with the United Nations Climate Change secretariat. She worked for the Indian NGO Sewa, after studying literature, philosophy, social and political sciences, and Indian languages.

Learn more about Laureline and One Resilient Earth here.

SESSION TITLE: Being the Wound: A Space for Refuge and Rest
SESSION DATE: Sunday, November 3rd

Mostly water and collections of bacteria and bone and stardust. An emergent invention Canadian West Coast island-born former New Yorker current Portlander curiouser researcher reader leader shape shifter code switcher beginner elder young a flash of light technologist social engineer experimental questioning contradictory vegan (except for brownies) consultant recoverer contributor community practitioner strategist poet weirdo professional queer non-binary neurodivergent raised-Quaker seemer listener fox cook step-parent partner collaborator co-keeper teacher coach flaneur aesthete hiker hard to locate reliable emerging being who practices synthesis learning listening walking investigating supporting reflecting confusing growing perplexing and occasionally punctuating

Learn more about LX here.

SESSION TITLE: SESSION TITLE: What is Water Trying to Tell Us?
SESSION DATE: Friday, November 1st

Malaury Kuhorn is the Ecological Ambassador of Creativity & Imagination for the Institute of Relational Being (IRB). She’s a weaver and storyteller interested in Multi-Species Connections, Regenerative Ecology and Eco-Philosophies. With an academic background in Environmental Geography and a Master’s in Engaged Ecology from Schumacher College, she dedicated her research to neurodiversity studies, exploring how neurotypical people engage with the more-than-human world. Malaury is committed to exploring and promoting ecological wellbeing through intersectional perspectives.

Learn more about Malaury and the Institute of Relational Being here, here and here.

SESSION TITLE: Making Sanctuary with Hermit Crabs
SESSION DATE: Saturday, November 2nd

Mari Rossi is a Brazilian PhD candidate at the University of Toronto exploring the entanglements of disability, care, and becoming. Her work weaves together psychoanalytic theory and posthumanist thought to examine how bodies, narratives, and material-discursive practices intra-act in the context of chronic illness. Drawing on autotheory and arts-based practices, Mari explores intergenerational hauntings, odd kin webs of relation, and the complexities of identity, challenging conventional understandings of agency, embodiment, and subjectivity. Her dissertation investigates the ethical and ontological implications of living with disability, proposing new modes of relating to self, other, and world that extend beyond the human. Mari currently resides in Bali, Indonesia.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

SESSION TITLE: Grief for Gaza: A Sensorial Journey
SESSION DATE: Thursday, October 31st 

Muna is a social activist with Sanctuary Santa Cruz Muslim Solidarity Group, and a peace activist with Combatants for Peace in Israel and Palestine. She offers workshops and talks in her local communities on how to build peace from the inside out. As an Arab Muslim woman born to Palestinian parents from Jerusalem in the United Arab Emirates and raised in Jordan, Muna embarked on a life transforming journey in 2008: migrating to the US as an international student. She sought out higher education in mental health counseling, with the intention to evolve as an open-minded compassionate human. Muna is curious about exploring all colors of cultures and religions by delving into the diversity of the United States. Through this journey, she has become a spiritual seeker, an enthusiast for personal and social transformation, and an advocate for peace and reconciliation.

Learn more about Muna here,

SESSION TITLE: Grief Rave
SESSION DATE: Wednesday, October 30th

Firm believer in the power of communities and has a passionate commitment to supporting their growth for the betterment of a sustainable society. Loves empowering individuals to recognize their own power to take meaningful steps towards creating a more sustainable society.

Learn more about Melinda here.

SESSION TITLE: Getting Unpalatable
SESSION DATE: Thursday, October 31st

Melissa is an artist, dancer, quilter, movement guide, grief and death doula, shaped by the wild aliveness of the landscape and culture of the American Southeast. As a facilitator, she helps people heal their creative lives and explore their relationship to their bodies and mortality. Her background as a professional dancer has shapeshifted through the years into creating experiences for others to get more in touch with their own way of moving and expressing. As a creative grief coach, she leads a seasonal online workshop for grief processing through quilting and hand-sewing–reimagining healing spaces as ones where our bodies, hands, and intuitive impulses guide the way. Melissa leads virtual and in-person dance classes and intuitive movement workshops, and is the host of the podcast Witch Sweat, a radio show at the intersection of art, death, movement, and spiritual self-inquiry.

Learn more about Melissa here and here.

SESSION TITLE: Fugitive Sounds: I’Ntu Worlds Endings Views
SESSION DATE: Wednesday, October 30th | Thursday, October 31st | Friday, November 1st | Saturday, November 2nd

Muf’U-Ntu is a fugitive sonic resonance that echoes through the realms that embraces Regeneration, Bewilderment, Wildcrafts, Movements, Deep Ecology, Storytelling and improvisational ceremonies with place.

Learn more about Muf’U-Ntu here and here.

SESSION TITLE: En el Centro está el Fuego
SESSION DATE: Saturday, November 2nd 

Nahú Rodríguez Montoya (Oaxaca, 1979) is an artist and researcher on sound and human rights issues. In his work, he explores the acoustic dimension of collective memory in the construction of the common. In recent years he has generated research around sonorities and our relationship with different modes of listening in the face of extractive, mineral and cultural processes.

Learn more about Nahú here.

SESSION TITLE: Noria Grief Café
SESSION DATE:Saturday, October 27th (in-person) & Wednesday, October 30th (online)
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SESSION TITLE: An Homage to the Dying World and A Pageantry of the Monstrous
SESSION DATE: Wednesday, October 30th – Sunday, November 3rd

Nico Wolf (Nicole Haciba Burke) is a healing practitioner, trans-disciplinary artist, writer, guide, regenerative farmer, beekeeper and facilitator of dreamwork, ceremony, and animistic practice. Her work incites rebellion against the status quo and invites fellow humans toward endless curiosity, courageous authenticity, compassion, and connectivity.  Through her group and private sessions, she ushers participants towards the transformation that can occur when finding oneself in unexpected and non-dual realities. She currently resides in O’gah P’Ogeh (Santa Fe, NM) with her husband, two children, two cats, dog, several thousand honeybees and the green beings of her large community garden. 

Learn more about Nico here and here.

SESSION TITLE: The Hallowed Scroll of the Monster
SESSION DATE: Meets every Sunday in October

We are a diverse group of crack-dwelling dreamers who have come together to co-envision new possibilities for society. Seeking ways of togetherness while embracing each other’s unique movement through relational space, we hope to hold tensions and find the ease that supports us as we relinquish what is familiar and allow the monstrous to emerge. With celebratory mourning for what came before and has never become, may the hidden, unusual, magnificent, and exploratory ways be revealed.

The group includes: Byron Mcmillan, Kyla Hoffbauer, Melissa Foster, Nico Wolf, Oliver Hillenkamp, Rebecca Peterson.

SESSION TITLE: Compositions and Decompositions for an Altar
SESSION DATE: Saturday, November 2nd 

A video-dance-butoh production laboratory in Oaxaca City, México engaging in a creative laboratory process for the purpose of co-creating a videodanza for Becoming Monster. This month, the group is weaving a network of great intimacy within this process, opening up personal themes, dreams, the unconscious and what we resist seeing… all of this in dialogue with greater forces of structural change that we feel in the world.

Mar Inés Cardoso is a bodywork researcher, art psychotherapist and butoh dancer She has trained with several second and third generation butoh masters. Her work integrates: body practice, imagery, video, design and creation of costumes, and writing. Learn more about Mar Inés here.

Alessandro Bo is a highly acclaimed photographer in Oaxaca, México. He is a current fellow with the National System of Art Creators and was featured by the British Journal of Photography in “Ones to Watch” in 2019 and by the The New York Times  in 2020. Learn more about Aless here.

SESSION TITLE: The Blue Notes
SESSION DATE: Friday, November 1st

Omi Osun Joni L. Jones is an artist/scholar/facilitator who employs Black Feminist aesthetics and theatrical jazz principles in her performance work and writing, her pedagogy, her facilitation and her daily living. Her performances include a solo critique of academic life, sista docta (1995-2018), and the ethnographic performance installation Searching for Òsun (2001). Omi’s most recent book is Theatrical Jazz: Performance, Àṣẹ, and the Power of the Present Moment. She is currently completing a collection of performance short stories – Sittin’ in a Saucer –about a 9-year-old Black girl growing up in the suburbs of Chicago in the late 1950s. Her training includes activist art with Robbie McCauley, theatrical jazz with Laurie Carlos, a Ph.D. from New York University, and an Embodied Social Justice Certificate from Transformative Change. Omi is a Professor Emerita from the African and African Diaspora Studies Department at the University of Texas at Austin, a mother, a Queer wife, and a curious sojourner.

Learn more about Omi here.

SESSION TITLE: Creative Practices of Revolutionary Aliveness
SESSION DATE: Thursday, October 31st  

Owólabi is a father, an MC, editor, life coach, and multidimensional culture worker from Detroit. He is a poet, essayist, and critic, a regular contributor to Riverwise, Geez, Therapeutic Edgelands, and Against The Current magazines. He collaborates frequently with AWE Society Press: as text editor of Bullet*Train and as author of the chapbook (2024), Lee,Young Lee. He is currently enrolled in Pacific University’s MFA program (nonfiction) and a member of Motor City Mobile Wellness, a holistic abolitionist healing collective. He found that his patterns of “keeping feelings held back” magnified all his health challenges; now he works to express himself freely and creatively. He carries 20+ years of cultural facilitation focused on environmental justice, disability justice, and New Afrikan sovereignty against material and spiritual modes of colonization. Allergic to genocide, but making the best of the hands we were dealt, Owólabi Aboyade stands on the shoulders of those who came before. Owólabi is co-facilitating the session, Creative Practices of Revolutionary Aliveness with Bridget Quinn. Free Palestine!

Learn more about Owólabi here, here and get his chapbook here.

SESSION TITLE: Theater Eats Monster
SESSION DATE: Saturday, November 2nd

Robin (they/them) is a multimedia storyteller, solidarity economy nerd, and tender plant tender. Their work involves bringing wealth stewards, artists and grassroots organizers together for culture-shifting, money-moving and land-returning efforts. Their roles include co-organizer with Art.Coop, a steward of Creative Wildfire, and co-director of Cooperative Journal Media. Their toolbox includes animation, improv, physical theater, handmade paper crafts, podcasting, puppetry, ecological restoration and trying to be present. They are a trans, queer, hardcore Gemini with ancestry from Western and Northern Europe, making home at Canticle Farm on Ohlone Land, Oakland, CA.

Learn more about Robin here.

SESSION TITLE: Re-Weirding
SESSION DATE: Wednesday, October 30th 

Sabrina is a liberatory design strategist, change alchemist, and the founder of Pause and Effect. Her work aims to dismantle coloniality within the institutions of design and research, by relying on technologies of relationality and care. Sabrina is the descendant of ancestors, who moved through repeated cycles of loss and survival – and brings their lessons of collective care and responsibility into her vision for flourishing futures.  She is also the co-founder of a community of liberatory praxis called Liberation Maasi’s. This provides a space for a local and global community of artists and dreamers to honor the wisdom and medicines passed down through matriarchal lineages, and envision approaches to eldering that are rooted in liberation and humility. Outside of work, Sabrina satiates her imagination through speculative fiction and sci-fi, slow time helping to cultivate and tend to the Moberly Medicine Garden, and shadowing her 2-year-old niece.

Learn more about Sabrina here, here and here and support her on Patreon here.

SESSION TITLE: Exploring our Layers
SESSION DATE: Thursday, October 31st

Sandy Buck is a Metis artist who has lived on the Sunshine Coast since 2007 helping start the non-profit arts organization, Deer Crossing the Art Farm. Sandy left Vancouver at the height of her career as a Costume Designer in the Film/TV/Theatre industry in 2007 to live in nature and pursue her passion for creative community building in the rural setting of a Gibson, BC. She and her community thrive to promote a balance of community growth and indigenous knowledge of the land we live on. She brings a wealth of skills developed from a 25 + year career working for arts organizations as a volunteer coordinator, youth programmer, event organizer, teacher and artist. She is also a performer, puppeteer, and one of the creative collaborators for the Rainforest Circus, a site-specific production on the Sunshine Coast that has toured to other rural locations.

Learn more about Sandy here.

SESSION TITLE: Becoming Monster: A Multidisciplinary Artist’s Playground
SESSION DATE: Wednesday, October 30th – Sunday, November 3rd

Sara Rothwell is a multifaceted artist, lover of the liminal, explorer of cracks and fissures and shaper of the formless, materialiser of spirit. She is a Canadian-born Londoner, daughter of Margaret and Frank, mother to Roman, beekeeper, guide and big believer in a different way of existing within the human and more than human world. For the last two decades, Sara has delved into various fields, including permaculture, Nonviolent Communication and conflict resolution, Classical Shamanism, and Shamanic practices inspired by the wisdom of the serpent and the honeybee which involves traversing the seen and unseen worlds, dream and oracular work, as well as various healing modalities. She is also a facilitator of women’s circles, sweat lodges and other ceremonial gatherings. She is a jewelry designer, creatrix and adorner of talismanic, and totemic pieces. Sara’s work is a reflection of her connection to nature, spirituality, and the mystical realms, offering a glimpse into her rich tapestry of experiences, knowledge and wisdom.

Learn more about Sara here, here, and here.

SESSION TITLE: In Honor of Wallflowers: Leading from the Periphery
SESSION DATE: Saturday, November 2nd

Sara El-Sayeh is a mother, dreamer and writer from Cairo, Egypt who believes in the power of imaginati in reinventing the whole world. Imagination is an act of defiance and protest. She spends her days playing, writing and listening to ways of decolonizing and thawing the freeze of capitalism.

Learn more about Sara here and here.

SESSION TITLE: Most of Us Die: Stories About Different Souls
SESSION DATE: Wednesday, October 30th

Simone Johnson (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher and cultural worker mostly making work about water.

Learn more about Simone here, here, and here.

SESSION TITLE: Mythic Monster Ecology
SESSION DATE: Friday, November 1st

Mammal, author, woman-mother, and question weaver one day at a time. Awkward prose-poet with no grammatical knowledge. Pilgrim through inner and outer landscapes of wild Iberian Mythology, remembering ancient earth practices, in radical presence, active listening, ecopsychology, eco-mythology, art, ecstasy, and writing. Ecopsychology, transpersonal and liberation psychology, radical listening and presence, as well as ecstasy, animism, and ancient sacred connections and contextual practices have reforged my soul. (Re)Learning to live in immanence, belonging, and depth awareness. Author of nine books, editor of the free online magazine, Wind and Water, Re-member the Bones Podcast, and Beyond the Sea Conversations – all in Portuguese. Sofia is co-facilitating the session, Mythic Monster Ecology with Telma G. Laurentino.

Learn more about Sofia here, here, and here.

SESSION TITLE: What if We Wonder Wander
SESSION DATE: Friday, November 1st 

Initiation and impulse stewards of the Swiss knot:
– Eva-Maria, a creative transformation co-sensor. Inquiry and research.
– Anne, a communicator practicing awe and unknowing

Co-weavers of the Swiss knot:
– Yolanda, a poetic soul healer. Invitation.
– Sanja, a science knowledge broker, microbiologist and cartoonist
– Naveen, a social artist, community weaver, somagination-ist, ex-roboticist

SESSION TITLE: Mythic Monster Ecology
SESSION DATE: Friday, November 1st

Telma G. Laurentino, PhD is an evolutionary biologist and educator. For 11 years, she studied biodiversity in detail, at the population genomics level, to understand how species evolve, diversify and adapt to ecological change. In parallel with her scientific research, she is dedicated to public education with diverse audiences, taking much pleasure in the translation processes of eco-evo-devo research into multisensory and creative ways of re-finding our sense of responsible belonging to biodiversity and Earth. She writes to process the paradoxes of existing in modern hyper-urbanized contexts, grounded in martial artist’s feet, a heart knowing the evolutionary ancestral connections between all life, and a mind challenged by a commitment to fostering accountable and loving ecosystemic relationships. Telma is co-facilitating the session, Mythic Monster Ecology with Sofia Batalha.

Learn more about Telma here, here, and here.

SESSION TITLE: Voice & Tree (an entry)
SESSION DATE: Friday, November 1st 

Tamar Korn has been a New York City-based vocalist for 20 years, experimenting with traditions of early jazz, American folk, and beyond, as well as original compositions. She’s known as a highly unique sound-maker, skillfully & often humorously playing her voice as instrument(s), and engaging collaboratively in continual improvisation. She’s appreciated for her existential spirit & intellect, incorporating poetic orations and ad libbing social-psyche commentaries as musical interlude. As a vocal teacher-facilitator, Tamar enjoys leading people of all ages and backgrounds in navigating their vocal imaginations somatically. Her approach centers internal sensation and emotional comfort-pleasure-play, which effectively tend to be gateways to braver experiments in widening the vocal palate, and thus one’s deeper visions of identity & humanity. 

Learn more about Tamar here and here.

SESSION TITLE: A Pedagogy of Death, Decay & Destruction: Sanctuary Making
SESSION DATE: Friday, November 1st

Toni is an artist, educator, consultant and facilitator working across multiple disciplines. Her work weaves the personal, political and poetic, asking questions about how to respond to the world in these times of polycrisis and possibility. Current work includes ‘a Devon Un/Learning Journey’ exploring place based praxis; research into ‘a Pedagogy of Death, Decay and Destruction’ and mentoring others. She is the founder of [the pause… in practice] which brings embodiment, presence and deep ecology together as a radical act, an invitation to stop in the midst of action, to disrupt our normal modes of being, to collectively fall silent and become aware of the moment we’re in. Toni has taught at Schumacher College; Goldsmiths London; co-designed ‘Radical Ecological Pedagogies’ with Ulex and is ongoing team for Wildwise’s ‘Call of the Wild’. She was a curator with The Emergence Network and an artist with Encounters Arts. She is known to create spaces where grit, grief, messiness, and laughter are welcome and where new kinds of wisdom and power can emerge. She is a now-and-again poet, singer, dancer, cook and forager.

Learn more about Toni here.

SESSION TITLE: Theatre of Tiredness
SESSION DATES: Wednesday, October 30th – Sunday, November 3rd

UndoBar is an ontological design-led research-to-resource platform co-habitating a circular collective of creators engaged in a multi-disciplinary praxis of world-building near Auroville, South of India. Through annual Research+Discovery Fellowship & Rest Residencies offered to neuro-divergent, QTIBPOC and disabled artists and creators, we are continually looking towards a world where thriving through kinship is accessible.

Learn more about UndoBar here.

SESSION TITLE: Pendulating Grief and Joy
SESSION DATES: Thursday, October 31st

Born and based in Ongata Rongai, East Afrika, Wangũi wa Kamonji is a regeneration practitioner researching and translating indigenous Afrikan knowledges into experiential processes, art, and honey. She has been following an ancestral invitation to rethink and reimagine everything from indigenous Afrikan ontologies, and extends this invitation to others through _fromtheroots_, an ecoversity providing rooted embodied tools for us to decolonise and reindigenise. You might find Wangũi reading, laughing, drinking tea, or dancing (maybe all at once).

Learn more about Wangũi and fromtheroots here and here.

SESSION TITLE: Writing with Monsters
SESSION DATE: Wednesday, October 30th

YG2D or You’re Going To Die is a U.S.-based nonprofit bringing diverse communities creatively into the conversation of grief, loss and our shared mortality, inspiring a more connected and meaningful experience of being alive. Weekly podcast, open mics, concerts, workshops, as well as programs for the incarcerated, those in hospice, and other patient programs. Ned Buskirk is Executive Director of YG2D, led to this work by a belief that our community deserves ongoing and consistent opportunities to creatively and vulnerably show up for one another, to gather and grieve, to suffer the losses we’ve endured or stand to lose eventually, to be with one another in the so often unspoken truth that we ALL share: we are ALL going to die. Chelsea Coleman is a San Francisco Bay Area singer-songwriter and the Creative Director & Cofounder of You’re Going to Die, where she has been helping create and hold space for others to creatively express themselves through the touchpoint of our shared impermanence since 2012. She’s been working alongside Ned Buskirk and Jordan Edelheit in San Quentin and other prisons around the country as a part of YG2D’s Alive Inside program since 2018.

Learn more about YG2D here, here, here and here.