Laurel Hill West

To open the first Philadelphia Death & Arts Festival, join Krista Nelson for a sacred Land Acknowledgement ceremony that honors the Lenape people—the original stewards of the land on which we gather. Rooted in reverence and renewal, this ceremonial experience invites participants to awaken a deeper connection to place, story, and spirit. Together, we will move through sacred elements of smudging, honoring the cardinal directions, music, and storytelling. Krista will be joined by Shavon Norris who will offer movement to accompany the ceremony. The Land Acknowledgement ceremony will be followed by a performance by Shavon Norris.

Laurel Hill West

Did you know the average funeral in America costs over $10,000? In America, where 37% of Americans could not cover a $400 emergency expense out of pocket, this can be prohibitively expensive, especially if someone dies unexpectedly. In Philadelphia in particular, the most common GoFundMe campaign during Covid-19 was for covering funeral expenses.

Join Philadelphia Community Deathcare for a workshop on how to die affordably in Philadelphia. We will talk about how you can craft your own beautiful ceremony at home, with or without paying for a funeral director, or only paying for minimal services such as transportation to a cemetery/crematory and help with filing death certificate paperwork. Most people don't realize that this is actually legal in every state in America!

This workshop will serve as an excellent setup for the shrouding workshop to follow, so if you attend this one, we highly recommend staying for the shrouding workshop in the same space immediately afterwards. 

Laurel Hill East

37 years apart, friends and artistic collaborators Eiko Otake and DonChristian Jones have created multiple performance and video works together. Their bodies co-inhabiting a wide range of spaces, they ran, collapsed, and held each other. Their spoken and non-verbal dialogues have focused on violence, survival, and witnessing. 

Prior to their site-specific performances at Laurel Hill East, which will intersect with each other, join them for a conversation: what does it mean to create urgent work? How do massive deaths differ from personal deaths? They will also recall how they attended the death and dying of a parent. 

Laurel Hill West

Join Pat Quigley, supervisor of Laurel Hill’s funeral home and a member of the Reconstructionist Chevra Kadisha, for a hands-on, step-by-step demonstration of how to shroud and prepare a body for green burial. Discussion will explore shrouding practices and other ways that family and community might participate directly in caring for their dead. 

This session will be immediately followed by a Green Burial workshop with deathcare worker Nefertiti Moor, so if you attend this one, we highly recommend staying for the green burial workshop afterwards. 

Laurel Hill West

Join deathcare worker Nefertiti Moor to explore natural, eco-friendly, and culturally meaningful ways to return to the earth. In this workshop we’ll learn what green burial is, how it works, and how it ties directly into ancestral practices. We’ll break down the myths surrounding natural burial, review legal rights, discuss eco-conscious burial options like biodegradable caskets and shrouds, and explore how green burials and home funerals often go hand-in-hand. In a world where funeral costs are rising and environmental harm is a concern, green burial offers a way to honor both the earth and our legacies with dignity and care. Death is not just an ending; but a natural, sacred return to where we came from.

Laurel Hill West

In times of grief and upheaval, singing together helps us to metabolize our sorrows. We sing to move our sadness, our rage, our longing and all that’s heavy on our hearts through the body. And we sing to find connection in our grief, to remember we’re not alone. This welcoming, nonjudgmental space will include group singing, embodied toning and vocalizing, as well as space to share your griefs out loud and offer your own medicine songs. All losses, from the personal to the collective, are welcome. Join us to help turn our sorrowing into a communal balm.

Laurel Hill East

What actually happens when the body dies—and why don’t more of us know? In this workshop, death midwife and artist Narinder Bazen offers a clear, grounded exploration of the body’s dying process, drawing on anatomy, poetry, and lived experience at the bedside. This isn’t just about facts—it’s about reclaiming our right to understand the intelligent design of the dying body. In a culture that hides death behind hospital curtains and euphemisms, learning how the body dies is an act of collective re-membering. When we know what to expect, we show up differently—for ourselves, our loved ones, and our communities. And that shift reverberates far beyond the deathbed.

Laurel Hill East

A Life, Unraveled

An immersive community experience in letting go.

What if you had to say goodbye to everything you loved… one breath at a time?

In this powerful, participatory workshop, you’ll be invited to reflect on the people, memories, dreams, and daily joys that make life meaningful — and then slowly, gently, begin to let them go. Through a guided narrative that mirrors the emotional journey of decline and dying, participants will physically release pieces of their own life story, one by one.

This is not a lecture. It’s not a performance.
It’s a space to feel, to remember, to grieve, to awaken.

Whether you’ve experienced loss, work in end-of-life care, or simply want to explore your relationship with mortality, this session offers a moving, meditative invitation to explore what it means to be alive — and what it means to let go.

Laurel Hill West

How might the practices of caretaking, grieving, and creative expression intersect? Join Philadelphia Death & Arts Festival artists Mel Hsu, mayfield brooks and DonChristian Jones for a conversation about caring for aging parents. While different for everyone, caretaking can be a profoundly meaningful, difficult, and transformative experience–from providing at-home hospice care to having important conversations about a loved one’s wishes, navigating changing relationships, processing grief, managing self-care and finding community support. 

The artists will discuss personal experiences in caretaking roles and how those embodied experiences have informed their creative work. Afterward, join a cozy space for informal and supportive group exchange about any of your own caretaking experiences. 

Laurel Hill East

Embrace a journey of renewal in a place between worlds. Join Ecotherapist Krista Nelson for a one-hour immersive journey through the cemetery, where we will walk through a garden of stories—each step an opportunity to reflect, release, and reconnect. This is a sacred space to honor grief not as an ending, but as a passage—where loss becomes a teacher and memory a guide. Through gentle prompts and healing rituals, we will walk together in ceremony, embracing grief as a living, evolving process that moves us from sorrow to grounding, from love to renewal.

In this experience, we’ll explore the stories of loss we carry and reflect on what those stories would say if they were marked in stone. We’ll consider the parts of ourselves that feel solidified, as though etched in time, and how they may be ready to be released. As we move through the ritual, we’ll honor the mystery of life’s unknowns with a somatic gratitude closing—physically expressing our thankfulness for the strength we’ve found in both holding on and letting go.

This walk is an invitation to pause, reflect, and experience the transformative power of grief as it guides us toward renewal.

Participants are encouraged to join Krista for a Lenape Mourning Song workshop immediately following the Grief Walk. 

Laurel Hill West

Because we live in a grief-phobic culture where many of us have internalized cultural and family messages that both dishonor and disenfranchise the very human experience of grieving, we rarely have the space to explore what our broken hearts truly need. 

Join grief coach and death midwife Naila Francis for a writing workshop to connect to your grief on the page and learn to meet it with more compassion and care. This session will include a brief grounding exercise, guided writing prompts, and (optional) group sharing. Please bring a journal and something to write with. 

Laurel Hill East

Join Lenape language teacher (Lënapei lixsëwakàn wintemakwi) Krista Nelson in learning the Lenape Mourning Song, an ancient expression of grief and reverence sung in the original language of this land.

This song offers a rare window into a cosmology in which the spirits of the departed journey along the River of Stars—known today as the Milky Way—on their passage from this world to the next. As we learn the melody, Lenape words, and their pronunciation, we honor not only those we’ve lost, but also the language and worldview of the Lenape people.

This offering is part of the ongoing effort by the Lenape Nation of Pennsylvania to revitalize the Lenape language and restore connection to the land through ancestral knowledge. Singing this song in the Lenape homeland is a sacred act of remembrance and renewal. Shavon Norris will be offering movement as part of the workshop.

Laurel Hill West

Aging in Black communities is often framed through crises—health disparities, economic insecurity, systemic neglect, and premature death. But what if we reframe the conversation to center the power of Black eldership, the artistry of intergenerational wisdom-sharing, and the radical act of preparing for a good death? This panel brings together Black death doulas, aging scholars, and artists who explore the intersection of mortality, culture, and creative expression. 
Through storytelling, research, and lived experience, panelists will examine the Combined Axes of Personal and Collective Grief in African Americans, the ways grief shapes Black futures, and how creative expression (specifically, Afrofuturism) can transform our understanding of aging and mortality. This conversation will challenge dominant narratives of death and grief in Black communities, and emphasize Black agency in shaping holistic, intentional, and liberated approaches to death, grief, and legacy to pave ways for more intentional, healthful futures. 

Laurel Hill West

Just as in life, dying is not only an individual experience but one that’s part of an interlocking framework of systems often driven by profit and power. The current deathcare industry in the U.S. reinforces systemic inequities based on class, race, ethnicity, ability, sexual orientation and gender identity, and centers dominant Western ideas of how aging, dying, and grieving should look. 

What could it look like to decolonize or undo the ideas and practices that privilege medicalized and commercialized ways of dying? What are the values, rights, and ancestral knowledge-ways that can help us re-envision and re-shape deathcare so that everyone has access to an autonomous and dignified death? What are the holistic ways we might reclaim human-centered, community-based practices that support an interconnected culture of dying that is just, equitable, and ecologically sustainable? Join Saharra Dixon, Eiko Otake, Krista Nelson and Narinder Bazen for a discussion that envisions the future of dying and deathcare.