I support people who are dreaming and building the world we need, with practices for meeting the world as it is — its vividness and subtlety, its atrocity and beauty. I write about radical friendship, and I teach Buddhist meditation, somatic movement, nervous system care, and creativity as pathways to deepening love and freedom in our everyday lives.

Born and raised in Chicago, I grew up dancing around with scarves, writing an epic serial novel, and reading an encyclopedia of world religions in my closet. I went on to earn a BFA in Dance from the Ailey School/Fordham University, and an MA in Performance Studies from NYU.

Over the past 15 years, I’ve offered contemplative, creative and embodied practices as catalysts for healing and change, in public schools, community health centers, activist organizations and performance collectives, as well as in retreat centers all around North America.

My first facilitation training came when I helped co-found the Meditation Working Group at Occupy Wall Street in 2011, where I learned to trust the wisdom of the group, and to help shape processes and containers that could bring that wisdom forward in fresh and powerful ways. I went on to take workshops at Training for Change, and to study awareness-based systems change with the Presencing Institute, where I completed the Advanced Training in Social Presencing Theater and eventually became a faculty member and consultant.

My work is grounded in almost twenty years of Buddhist study and practice, including many months of silent retreat practice. In 2016 I completed the Community Dharma Leader Training at Spirit Rock Meditation Center, and in 2020, I received authorization to teach in the Theravada/Western Insight tradition through Spirit Rock’s four-year Buddhist Residential Retreat Teacher Training, under the guidance of Larry Yang, Gina Sharpe and Lila Kate Wheeler. I’m deeply steeped in African/African Diasporic religions, and those paths are at the heart of my own practice.

In 2021, I became a mother, which is its own long retreat, with much less silence — and much more mindfulness, compassion, patience and joy than I ever thought possible. I also published Radical Friendship: Seven Ways to Love Yourself and Find Your People in an Unjust World that year.

Today, I serve as the Interim Executive Director of Buddhist Peace Fellowship, an organization that offers skill building and spiritual support for peacemakers, grounded in Buddhist ethics and collective care. I sit on the stewarding teachers council at Spirit Rock Meditation Center, the guiding teachers council at True North Insight, and occasionally facilitate my own programs online. A real nerd, I’ve also earned studied Neurosomatic Intelligence, Somatic Embodiment and Regulation, and Liberatory Coaching, and am currently training as a community care practitioner at the Black Healing Centre in Montreal.

In February 2027, I’ll lead a seven-month online Radical Friendship Practice Lab, exploring friendship as a path of freedom through love, challenge, change, and the direct experience of interdependence.