projects, art

Women’s health and wellbeing advocacy projects

My women’s health and wellbeing advocacy projects over the years, have included art-making, events, listening sessions, knowledge-sharing, conversation experiences, care, membership, and discoveries.

vagina vérité

vagina vérité is a documentary photography project & book (so women could see ourselves for ourselves and have the conversations women don’t usually get to have). The conversations sparked two weekend-long, visual and performance art Vagina Festivals, salons, listening sessions, in-person art-and-conversation experiences, and The Bodylife Library Lab gatherings, exploring female bodylife experiences, concerns, joys, and personal histories.

The project was born during the summer of 2000, during a conversation with a friend about what our vaginas looked like, and how they compared to other vaginas. As there was no visual reference available, and this made me mad, I set about photographing vulva portraits. I named the project vagina vérité, an unabashed exploration of the plain, ordinary, mysterious matter of our vaginas.

Vagina Festival

Through visual art, performance, speaker presentations and interactive activities, Vagina Festival formed a welcoming space for exploring sexuality, body image, personal identity, health and well-being.

As part of V-Day’s Worldwide Campaign, Vagina Festival 2007 was an opportunity to see, hear and talk about what too-rarely gets talked about. Vagina Festival was an invitation to raise awareness of the pervasiveness of violence against women, to challenge its chokehold on women worldwide; to support women who have survived violence and to honor the women who have not; to create a space where people can come together and women’s stories can be told, and to celebrate women, peace, creativity and collaboration. Agni Gallery, 170 East 2nd Street, between Avenues A & B, Feb. 16-18, 2007.

Bringing together ceremony, comedy, dance, monologues, music, painting, performance art, photography, plays, poetry, sculpture, video (and more!) – Vagina Festival 2008, an all-volunteer experience (including over 60 visual and performance artists), provided much-needed space to consider sexuality, body image, personal identity, health and well-being. Together, we exchanged ideas, challenged cultural norms and celebrated women. Sage Theater, 71 Seventh Avenue, NYC, Oct. 24-26, 2008.

vv-Salons

vv-Salon, NYC was a series of monthly gatherings, where you could view the v-portraits, which were installed on my living room walls, and engage in conversation. Oct. 2010 — May 2011 topics included:

  • early memories and messages: what were you told? what did you see?
  • v-anatomy 101
  • menstruation

Here’s what some of the participants had to say about vv-Salons: “It’s the only place to have this conversation.”— “I never know who I will meet.” — “I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed attending your salon. A lot of intriguing ideas were discussed and my fellow attendees were an interesting bunch of people.” It’s not just the topic that moved and engaged, it was each other. Being in conversation is: aliveness.

Society for Menstrual Cycle Research Artist Member / Treasurer

From 2005-2014, I was an artist member of the Society for Menstrual Research. I exhibited vagina vérité at the 2005-Spokane and 2011-Pittsburgh conferences, went on to serve as SMCR Treasurer (2010-2014), maintaining our books, tracking our memberships, and our conference budgets. And.. I contributed a series of blog posts between Nov 2011 and Nov 2012.

  • What to tell the girl in my life about menstruation?
  • What I told the girl in my life about menstruation
  • Alongside Scientists Exploring Why Women Menstruate
  • Am I losing friends when I post menstrual cycle stuff on my Facebook page?
  • Tell me again, why can’t we talk about body stuff?
  • Top five reasons not to talk about the menstrual cycle
  • How come we even have a Society for Menstrual Cycle Research?
  • You can ignore anything, even blood
  • Would you want to be in a relationship with you?
  • I’m sick of being special.
  • That time of the month can sneak up on you
  • moments of girl-bonding
  • How to menstruate while camping?
  • It’s something that’s happening to me; it’s not part of me

normal is diverse exhibition

The normal is diverse exhibition took place on December 08, 2018 at Ludlow Studios on the Lower East Side of NYC. It was the first time that vagina vérité had been exhibited since 2009. We installed 110 vagina portraits on two walls, and on a third, we established a space for everyone, who wanted to, to post their thoughts IRL. The normal is diverse exhibition was a visual and conversational inquiry into individual and collective beliefs about what is normal.

listening sessions

I’m not sure when this started, but I was imagining there could be a way of indexing all of our stories and the information that we learned from our own bodies, as well as from health and medical service providers, so that any individual woman, any organization or website can more easily access an endlessly growing body of knowledge contributed one-by-one by each of us at our own discretion, via a secure and open-source protocol, designed specifically to help us live empowered, healthy, and happy bodylives. I couldn’t help wondering —

…What would be different in your life if you lived in a world that reflected, supported and respected your bodylife experiences?

In 2019, I began holding listening sessions. I felt (and continue to feel) that we should be able to:

  • See ourselves for ourselves as the subjects of our bodylife stories (not as objects defined by men or anyone).
  • More freely and safely benefit from each other’s bodylife experiences, to connect with women and learn from each other’s similarities and differences.
  • Live in a world where female bodylife is part of the design of public and private spaces, where we are expected, respected and supported

So, I invited women to audio-only calls, to listen to, and to gather up individual experiences, stories, thoughts and feelings. and questions.

At some point, I named it.

The Bodylife Library

The Bodylife Library grew out of vagina vérité, a series of over 100 vagina portraits, documentary-style photographs, that I began shooting during the Fall of 2000, as a response to a friend who asked me out of the blue: Do you like the way your vagina looks? That conversation changed my life. Somehow, I hadn’t noticed how much we did not talk about — not just about our vaginas — about every aspect of our complex female bodylives…

I believe that accessible information and open conversation are the foundation of a world where living a female bodylife is intrinsic to the design of our everyday lives. Not an add-on. Not at an extra cost.Where each of us can live fully-empowered female bodylives on our own terms.

art & conversation experiences

Because: when it comes to our bodies, not just how they look, but our bodylife experiences, there’s a lot more noise than information, conversation or care. For me, art is the conduit to conversations we don’t usually get to have. I created a set of the v-portraits that I could lay out on tables, and with the help of friends, organized co-creative conversation experiences:

  • From silence to voice, Oct 2019
  • Telling our stories, Nov 2019

The Bodylife Library Lab Jan 2020—Jul 2020

At the top of 2020, I began a monthly art & conversation series, The Bodylife Library Lab. It was the second club I started at The Wing, a women’s club were I was a member. (The first was The Experiential Lab, more on that below). I could reserve space for us and invite women to view the v-portraits, which I now had in a ready-to-go kit. I set the table with them, and conversation cards to bring in the voices of women who had participated in previous participatory experiences. Bodylife Library Lab topics included:

  • When it comes to women’s bodies, there’s more noise than conversation or care
  • Being Looked At / Being Seen
  • Reflecting on your personal landscape

We met online beginning in Mar 2020 (due to COVID-19 pandemic lockdown), and continued on with:

  • The goop lab vulva episode, The Pleasure Is Ours (online)
  • Rape Culture
  • Abortion is normal, isn’t it?
  • Sexuality Education, if you could do it over…
  • Reproductive Justice
  • Black Mamas Matter
  • Our vaginas
  • Vagina art and vulva imagery out in the world

(discovery of) Maintenance Art

What if the most interesting work to be made had no tangible results, and were about keeping people alive? << This second question that changed my life was asked by Carmen Winant in an An Interview with Mierle Laderman Ukeles. I have a lot more to share about this. For now, I invite you to read the manifesto and imagine it emerging in hot burst of truth inside young-artist-mother Mierle Laderman Ukeles. We are so lucky.

living room picnics

I invited friends to a weekly online living room picnic during pandemic lockdown.

A living room picnic is a small-group conversation that begins around a particular topic, and then goes where it goes. Friendly digital get togethers where you can reflect, relax and have a candid conversation, like you do when you’re on a picnic. Anyone can hold a living room picnic.

It started with a picnic about Maintenance Art, which I discovered while reading How to Do Nothing, Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell. Soon after, we explored the principles of Emergent Strategy, Shaping change, Changing Worlds, by adrienne maree brown. We unhurriedly wandered on from there, picnicking 66 times from Feb 2021 — Jun 2022. I know you’re curious, and I’ll share a complete living room picnic topic list soon.

UNDERMININGnormal digital coffeehouse

UNDERMININGnormal is the digital coffeehouse of my dreams: an unhurried space for conversations women don’t usually get to have. It’s being renovated and will re-open soon. I rushed to build it for living room picnic and love study hall attendees, with a room here and there for personal projects with friends. I hope to renovate it soon, and open rooms for us to gather and talk and commune.

Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence Survivor Advocate

As an Emergency Department Survivor Advocate at Weill Cornell Medical Center, I provided emotional and informational support to help sexual assault and domestic violence survivors navigate the hospital experience and understand their options and available services (2023-2024). The program is run by the Victim Intervention Program, where I participated in a 40-hour training program with fellow survivor advocates and a deeply caring array of women’s health and wellbeing practitioners, from nurses, to community services providers, to law enforcement and our wonderful program administrators, where we explored the complexities of being there for survivors.

51& Founding Member

Founding Member of a new women’s health venture, named 51&, uniting women’s voices, dollars, and voting power to rebuild the foundation of a health system that was never designed for us and shape how women’s health is funded, experienced, and sustained. Because when women unite, the system shifts. I’m excited to be part of building better care, services, and outcomes in the women’s health industry — together. I joined in October 2025. You can too: https://51and.com/

“51& is a Public Benefit Corp and the first organization to fund work across every lever that impacts women’s health, with the ambition to undo the structural neglect that harms women across every stage of their life.”

vulva vérité continuing education

More on this soon..

Art, placemaking & community

For me, it seems, it always begins with art. I think it’s a mix of childhood shyness that I haven’t fully shaken yet, but also a deep joy in looking, listening, and using my hands to remember it all, being here.

Oil painting

For a time, painting was the center of my universe. I haven’t made an oil painting in a while, but the other day, I was talking with an artist currently working in oil, and we shared a knowing heart-gasp when I remembered / said aloud: oil painting is everything. More on this at oil on canvas.

The Experiential Lab

In 2018, I attended a workshop hosted by Priya Parker, and read her book, The Art of Gathering, and got really excited about what becomes possible when people get together.

Be it a business meeting, product launch, birthday dinner or conversation space—a gathering is a temporary world with impactful possibilities.

If you design for it, and by that I mean: decide on and attend to what matters (to you as the host, and to your guests, collaborators, members, colleagues, directors, constituents, and so on) you can inspire true connection and move people.

The Experiential Lab was (and may be again) a gathering to deconstruct and discover the ways to good gathering. We talked through all kinds of events, and invoked The Art of Gathering’s six-stage approach as a guide to re-envisioning the special and the routine events, ceremonies, meetings of our lives. The Lab ran from September 2019 (in-person, monthly meetings in NYC) through July 2020 (then moving online in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown).

If you’re interested in talking about gathering, let me know.

East River Park Life

I only discovered the original East River Park when walking became my lifeline during pandemic lockdown. It has since been demolished and replaced. More on this at East River Park Life.

Small town in the city

Small town in the city is a monthly gathering in my building to foster friendliness and care (2023-ongoing). It was conceived as a catalyst and a to local wellbeing. In simplest terms, I wanted to know my neighbors, for saying hello in the elevator, lobby and our street to be a thing we do here in Turtle Bay, Midtowneast Manhattan, NYC.

When I initiated Small town in the city, I thought of local wellbeing in a general sense, but recently, I noticed how people can be quietly scared about living alone, about what could happen to them while in their apartments, and how would anyone know? So, now I think about aging in place as a community.

People should be seeing more art newsletter loveletter

More on this soon..