About Me

BIO

I am a white, queer, working class, third-culture person of Irish and English ancestry. I’m a descendent of settlers, which I understand to mean that my bloodline traded belonging for power. I am committed to exposing and understanding the costs of this trade and joining with my ancestry of queer and trans freedom fighters, healers, artists, and third culture shapeshifters to move toward repair.

I am deeply shaped by growing up in Central Asia and Turkey, moving back to the states to attend college at 18. After several years in Tennessee and Texas, grad school brought me to Seattle. As much as I’ve grown to love it here, my heart is very much with the global and American South.

I’m a soft sculpture artist interested in questions about ritual and process. I live with chronic pain and some DSM diagnoses of my own. I’m always reading 6 books at once, and I feel most like myself when I’m swimming nakey in a big old lake.

EDUCATION

My teachers and learning have been many outside of the formal education system and I honor my teachers who have been aunties and uncles, art mentors, community members, queer and trans elders, farmers, writers, activists, alongside well as more-than-human teachers like water and the earth.

I have a Bachelors degree in Studio Art with an emphasis on ceramics and sculpture, and a Masters degree in Counseling Psychology from The Seattle School. In graduate school I concentrated my studies on Trauma & Abuse, with a parallel investigation on the role of shame in perpetuating white supremacy and religious traumatization. In my clinical internship I provided therapy to teens and adults in an affordable therapy program.

SUPERVISION

I am deeply grateful to be under the clinical supervision of Smruti Desai, LPC, LMHC.

Learn more about her here.