i express through interdisciplinary work exploring the conditions under which people create, learn, think, connect, fragment, and repair. raised in suburban evangelical middle america, in a landscape shaped by both cultural amnesia and inherited histories of displacement and violence, questions became both refuge and compass. perhaps it began with the quiet dissonance of queerness in spaces organized around certainty. the seeking life became the path.
questions like “how do people create?” led me to the eastman school of music and a decade working nationally as an opera singer and collaborative artist. “how do people learn, lead, and think together?” led toward the harvard graduate school of education, adaptive leadership work through the harvard kennedy school, and eventually toward producing interdisciplinary arts and civic projects across the united states.
as creative lab director for the grammy award-winning ensemble eighth blackbird, i helped develop cohort-based artistic residencies and festivals at yerkes observatory, bringing together composers, musicians, and researchers to investigate how rigorous inquiry, collective experimentation, and artistic practice might coexist. alongside collaborator swati bhargava, i also co-develop qima, a creative advising and consulting practice working with executive leaders to develop multi-year projects blending civic understanding, social connection, systems thinking, and the arts across educational, nonprofit, spiritual, and community contexts. the work has since expanded across educational, civic, and community settings throughout the u.s., europe, and central america.
now training as a clinical social worker in minneapolis, the work increasingly centers questions of breakdown, care, psychosis, institutional life, and relational repair in an era of fragmentation and accelerating complexity. particular interests include group process, therapeutic presence, systems dynamics, and the fragile human conditions that make collaboration, meaning-making, and repair possible.
across mediums including sound, facilitation, writing, research, watercolor, and participatory performance, i continue returning to a small constellation of questions:
how do people create?
how do people learn?
how do groups hold together?
what happens when systems break down?
how do we repair?