About Death & Arts
Why death + arts?
Death can be scary and overwhelming.
It is not meant to be dealt with all by our lonesome.
We believe that gathering together to:
experience visionary art,
share pragmatic resources to help plan for death,
make space for conversation, reflection, and advocacy
creates life-affirming changes– in an otherwise dysfunctional dying culture– for individuals, their communities, and society at large.
Mission
Death can be scary and overwhelming. It is not meant to be dealt with all by our lonesome. Too often, the systemic and cultural structures that shape our approach to aging, dying, and grieving in the US are isolating and alienating.
We imagine that any Philadelphian who will die, or loves someone who will die, could have access to a culture of dying that centers our humanity, our care for each other, and our love for the greater world.
Philly is home to brilliant people who are thinking deeply about death. They are dancers, palliative care physicians, poets, hospice nurses, musicians, mothers, social workers, singers, death doulas, elders, and caregivers. People whose hearts are breaking.
PDAF gathers these folks to build a more connected public culture around aging, dying, and grieving, one that centers communal and individual experiences, practices and traditions.
History
Philadelphia Death & Arts Festival was founded in 2024 when Annie gathered a group of brilliant artists, death workers, and cultural producers together to envision a festival that paired live performance with practical death education.
In 2025, the first festival brought artists, death workers, and hundreds of attendees together at Laurel Hill Cemetery for four days of performances, workshops, panel discussion, and shared reflection.
As we move towards the future, PDAF is continuing to build relationships with artists, death workers– and people who identify as neither– already doing the work of envisioning a liberated future.
Since the start of Covid in 2020, Philly choreographer and death doula Annie Wilson had been witnessing a few things:
Individuals facing death within our existing systems who were often isolated, with limited options and not enough community support,
Artists creating visionary work that imagined more expansive ways of caring for one another, mourning our individual and collective losses, and facing death and collapse with heart and courage,
Brilliant death workers actively working to build new systems that can support us as we age, die and grieve.
Visioning Committee
Sha’Eureka Davis, MHS, LSW, LMSW
Sha’Eureka is a seasoned Human Services professional, advocate, and entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience dedicated to promoting quality, equality, and independence for older adults and individuals with disabilities. As a Licensed Social Worker in Pennsylvania (LSW) and Delaware (LMSW), Sha’Eureka has committed her life to being a "voice for the voiceless" and ensuring that every individual has the opportunity to successfully age in place and live independently within a unified community.
Sha’Eureka’s profound commitment to this field began at the age of thirteen, while helping her family care for an uncle with an intellectual disability. Witnessing her grandparents struggle to navigate a complex and fragmented social services system, Sha’Eureka made a defining childhood decision: to devote her education and career to ensuring other families would never have to struggle alone to find vital resources.
This mission fueled an impressive academic and professional journey. She earned a Master’s degree in Human Services with a concentration in Family Counseling and Psychology. She went on to develop The Sensible Senior Services Group and H.E.L.P (Helping-Elderly-Live-Productively). In 2020, Sha’Eureka launched Infinity Reliable Solutions, a corporation dedicated to providing a plethora of resources that empower older adults and people with disabilities to thrive safely and independently in community settings.
In addition to her entrepreneurial leadership, she serves as a Service Coordinator for community-based individuals who are nursing facility clinically eligible. In this role, she assess complex needs, design person-centered care plans, and lead critical discharge planning and transitions to safely bring individuals out of nursing facilities and back into the community. Through decades of clinical expertise and grassroots passion, Sha’Eureka remains an unwavering champion for residents' rights and system-wide equality.
David is an Artistic Director and Co-Founder of Headlong Dance Theater, a platform for performance research founded in Philly in 1993. David also directed the Headlong Performance Institute, a trans-disciplinary performance practice and training residency whose graduate fellows are leaders in creating experimental and community-based work around the US. Headlong’s large body of work has performed nationally and internationally and is known for its experiential and participatory nature, often co-created with audiences and communities. David’s work has received many awards and accolades including a NY Bessie for choreography; a Japan-US Friendship Commission Fellowship and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts.
I am a spirit lead justice, seeker advocate for the least last and loss in our community
I am a spiritual director/companion.
I am a certified lay minister in Meritus of the United Methodist Church.
I am a member of the Board of Directors for the Center Philadelphia.
The Board of Directors of the sickle cell disease association of America, Delaware Valley chapter.
A member of the national Federation of The Blind.
A member of people with disabilities/awareness committee.
A member of the commission on religion and race.
I am an avid reader, tea enthusiast a collector of rocks and a lover of all things, butterflies, and all things Purple.
I am a Philadelphia PA-based performing artist, vocal and movement improviser, percussive dancer, cultural strategist, writer, oral historian and archivist. A principal focus in my practice is the histories and cultures of Philadelphia Pennsylvanians of the African Diaspora. I create songs, texts and choreographies for performance works, and design and execute projects that tell stories of African American life, arts and culture. And I design and support environments and creative structures for exploring the power of improvisation to animate performance and hone habits of connection among people and between people and their built and natural environments. My archival work challenges the ways that conventional archives tell the stories of African Americans and other marginalized people, and supports important African American culture bearers in collecting and preserving their archival assets. One way I share my practice is by advising and supporting other artists in articulating their artistic vision and locating resources to realize them.
Annie (she/her) is a Philly-based choreographer, performer, and death doula. Her dances focus on the experience, rather than the appearance, of the body. Her work as a death doula focuses on supporting people to make end-of-life plans and offering grief ritual support.
She regularly leads keening workshops which consist of two parts: the first part details the history and erasure of the Gaelic mourning practice of keening (ritual wailing). The second part is a grief ritual inspired by keening. She is a 2017 Pew Fellow, and her work has been supported primarily by the community of artists, bartenders, elders, and end of life professionals in Philly and beyond.
Shannon Brooks is a multisensory artist working across movement, sound, sculpture, installation, action, moving image, and long-term embodied practices. Their work combines the heightened ritual of performance with the imperfections of process. They love the natural world and the unreal. As a Disabled/low-vision person, they understand accessibility as a creative force that can transform time, space, and power structures. Shannon is fresh from a residency at the Soil Factory in Ithaca NY where they experimented with compost and soil scientists, artists and activists.
Photo by Julia Lehman
Rebecca Maury MD FACP (she/her) is board certified Internist and Hospice/Palliative Care physician with over 20 years of clinical experience. She is a co-founder of Threshold Collective, where she provides clients with support in medical decision making, medical systems navigation, end of life planning, direct support to the dying, home vigils, grief support, and celebrations of life.
Brittanie (she/her) has collaborated with artists, community organizers, death workers, schools and museums to develop and deliver public programs for more than a decade. Prior to her role as Public Programs Manager with the Friends of Laurel Hill, she was the Program Director for One Book, One Philadelphia, an annual citywide reading and civic dialogue festival at the Free Library. She is a writer and a rower.
Naila Francis is a certified grief coach and death midwife, who’s also completed psychotherapist and soul activist Francis Weller’s Grief Ritual Leadership Training. She helps people transform their relationship to grief and loss through one-on-one coaching, workshops, and as a community grief tender. Naila is a founding member of Salt Trails, a Leeway Foundation award-winning Philadelphia collective working to normalize grief through community rituals. She is also a wedding officiant and poet.
Cat Ramirez (they/them) is a queer, mixed race, Philly-based performance director and producer who loves logistical puzzles, community meals, and bisexual lighting. Some of their favorite directing projects include She Was a Conquistawhore with Rachel O’Hanlon Rodriguez and Die Cast, Letters to the Moon and deciphering the knots in the pine beams with Mel Hsu, Half Magic with Joseph Ahmed, Meet Murasaki Shikibu with Tiny Dynamite (Barrymore nomination for Outstanding Direction), Young Americans with Theatre Horizon, and Space Opera with Obvious Agency. They have produced and developed programming for the Bearded Ladies Cabaret, Asian Arts Initiative, Philadelphia Asian Performing Artists, and Lightning Rod Special, and their writing has appeared in American Theatre Magazine. Cat is the Creative Producer and a worker-owner for Obvious Agency. They serve as a Board Member of the Stockton Rush Bartol Foundation, and are an alumni of the National New Play Network’s Producer-In-Residence Program.
Partners and Friends
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