Steering Committee Chair, Choreographer

Annie is a Philly-based choreographer, performer, and death doula. Her dances focus on the experience, rather than the appearance, of the body in its fragility, neuroses, and grief. Her work as a death doula focuses on supporting people to make end-of-life plans, witnessing them in their grief, and offering grief rituals. She is obsessed with keening, the Irish tradition of ritual wailing at a funeral. 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. Some dances you may recognize: Always the Hour, At Home with the Humorless Bastard, and Lovertits.

Steering Committee, Professional Swiss Army Knife

Cat Ramirez (they/he/she) is a queer, mixed race, Philly-based, neurodivergent performance director and producer who loves logistical puzzles, community meals, and bisexual lighting. Their work empowers the person inside them who was socialized to be quiet and ashamed of having opinions.  Some of their favorite directing projects include Space Opera with Obvious Agency, Everybody with Temple University, She Was a Conquistawhore with Rachel O’Hanlon Rodriguez, Today Is My Birthday with Theatre Exile, Letters to the Moon with Mel Hsu and Intercultural Journeys, Half Magic with Joseph Ahmed, and Meet Murasaki Shikibu with Tiny Dynamite (Barrymore Nominated for Outstanding Direction). Cat currently serves the Creative Director for Philly Asian Performing Artists (PAPA), the Cooperative Operations Manager for Obvious Agency, and a board member of the Stockton Rush Bartol Foundation.

Steering Committee, Program Director Friends of Laurel Hill

Steering Committee, This Hallowed Wilderness

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.

Steering Committee, Artistic Director Headlong Dance Theater

Steering Committee, Maas Building, Threshold Collective

Catherine Birdsall is a Clinical Herbalist of nearly 25 years, and Nurse Practitioner with a focus on Adult and Geriatric patients. She spent many years working in Geriatrics and Palliative Care/Hospice. Currently, Catherine works as a Nurse Practitioner serving Philadelphia’s Hispanic immigrant community at Puentes de Salud in South Philadelphia, and as a Death Educator and Doula with Threshold Collective, an organization she co-founded with Dr. Rebecca Maury. Threshold Collective is dedicated to the radical support of all those who are encountering dying; and in addition to serving dying patients and their families, the collective hosts and produces arts events which explore themes of grief and loss.

Steering Committee, Threshold Collective

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.