In 2024, I gathered a group of esteemed colleagues who were deathworkers, artists, and cultural producers. Together, we visioned the Philadelphia Death and Arts Festival, which had its first iteration in 2025 at Laurel Hill Cemetery. The festival featured original work by 5 brilliant artists, workshops by grassroots deathworkers, and reflection spaces to hang out, talk with a deathworker, sit with trees and the gravestones.

Check out more about the festival here. 

This committee is currently envisioning smaller events throughout 2027 that are embedded in communities where people are aging, dying, and grieving, with another 4-day festival to be scheduled in 2028. Want more updates about PDAF? Contact me!

In 2020 I launched a death doula practice, Sunset Companions, with Russ Alexander. We offered individual support to dying ones and their loved ones, as well as educational sessions to seniors around the city. What I found, through serving clients, facilitating educational sessions, and through peer support with other death workers in the city, was firsthand experience of the profound death phobia that pervades society. 

Which is not to say people are afraid to die. Who isn’t. It is to say that the structures and culture that shape our lives from beginning to end are ones that exploit our innate fear of death and use it to make money. Of course. 

There are many individuals and small groups throughout the city working very hard to build a grassroots movement that shifts our dominant culture in such a way that aging, dying, and grieving can be less fearful, more enfranchised, more human(e) experiences. 

I wanted to bring these people together for a festival.