Creative Mourning

PAUSE x Feminist Center for Creative Work (FCCW)

Creative Mourning is a six-month, in-person peer support series designed for people of color in Los Angeles. Facilitated in partnership with PAUSE and the Feminist Center for Creative Work, these peer-led gatherings offer a creative, non-clinical space to explore grief and memory through art — outside of institutional and therapeutic frameworks.

Each monthly session invites participants to explore grief through a different artistic modality guided by guest creatives and grounded by the presence of experienced grief-holders from our communities, including a POC mental health practitioner and a death doula.

Together, we’ll make, move, and reflect in community - holding space for grief to surface creatively, and supporting one another through presence, ritual, and art. And we’ll share a communal meal to close out every session. Whether you're grieving a person, a place, a version of yourself, or a collective loss, this circle welcomes you. Participants will also receive a curated grief resource booklet and be part of this pilot.

Though we will have a mental health professional present, this space is not a substitute for therapy or crisis support. Instead, it is an offering for creative witnessing, collective exploration, and community-making around grief.

Dates, times, and location

October 3, November 7, December 5, January 9, February 6, March 6, and April 3

5:30-7:30pm PT

Feminist Center for Creative Work, 3053 Rosslyn St, Los Angeles, CA 90065

Session schedule (sample)

5:15-5:30pm ~ arrive, settle into the space, & grab snacks

5:30-5:45pm ~ group grounding ritual & opening discussion

5:45-6:45pm ~ arts workshop & further group discussion

7-7:30pm ~ communal dinner & closing ritual

Meet the artists

Malavika Rao

I am a multidisciplinary artist and educator primarily working in painting, fiber, and installation. In my practice, I recontextualize practices of homemaking as methods of worldmaking, using craft to heal generational trauma and tend to the fragile relationship between care and survival. In my installations, I employ various crafting practices as modes of speculative world-building—creating spaces to interrogate inherited structures of care. These spaces propose alternative relational frameworks grounded in reciprocity and collective sustenance, invoking a deeper, cosmological sense of interconnectedness, where the act of making becomes a ritual of repair, attunement, and orientation toward life-affirming futures.
This workshop invited participants to an ongoing textile practice to carry with them over the course of the six months of the program. In our first session, we will create “stitchbooks” - soft, hand-bound journals made from cotton batting and cloth. During the first session, we will design the cover of our journal using intuitive textile piecing methods, reflecting on our relationship to grief at this moment in time.
Between the first and final session, participants will keep their stitchbooks close, adding to them as they experience the other workshops. This ongoingness offers a personal portable space for processing and remembering, allowing grief to move at its own pace.
In our final gathering, we will return to our stitchbooks as a collective, inviting eachother to share the process of making, the textures and memories we’ve stitched in, and any pages we feel comfortable revealing. Together we will fill the last spread of our books, reflecting on the experience of Creative Mourning, and the ways our relationships to grief may have shifted over the last few months.
What you expect participants to gain:
- An understanding of textile practices as slow, intentional ways of moving through feeling and being present with oneself.
- A hand-bound fabric journal that serves as both a tactile record and a soft space for processing of this experience
- A practice of making that invites patience, care, and attunement to material as well as one’s own body and rhythms.
Who you are honoring with your work: I honor slowness as a way of being, in opposition to speed and extractive demands of capitalism - I honor the legacy of crafters and makers I come from, continuing a lineage where making is inseparable from living.

Megha Jairaj

Megha Jairaj is an artist from anti-god's own county, Kerala. Their practice is shaped by a call to collaborative repair of what has been disfigured by caste, capital, and carcerality. Through performance, text, and pedagogy, they explore how ecologies, personal archives and body-knowledge can be activated to imagine and live otherwise.
Participants are invited to bring an object of choice to this session. The object each participant brings may be personal, may belong to someone else, or simply be something they feel drawn to work closely with. Some guiding questions might be: Is there an object I am holding on to while navigating my grief? Is there something in my yard or on my walks that speaks to my grief? Together, we will engage in a mapping exercise that traces pivotal turns and transgressions, both material and relational, that the object has moved through. Along the way, we will ask how the economy distorts our grief, and how our chosen objects might help us see beyond its measures of value.

What you expect participants to gain:
- A map to take home created at the workshop
- An understanding of personal grief as a multi-scalar phenomenon that remembers, informs, and reshapes the way forward
Who you are honoring with your work: With my work, I honor my grandpa Sugathan, who carried the medicine of stories with him, and planted them in everyone that passed by him.

Marissa Herrera

Marissa Herrera is a 3rd generation Chicana/Indigenous woman and a lifelong Angeleno. She is the Co-Founder and Executive Artistic Director of 4C LAB (501c3) and CEO of De Mi Alma Productions creating work for stage, tv and film as a director, choreographer and producer. As a leader in Arts Education, Marissa firmly believes in using the arts as a tool to empower and nurture young creative visionaries to develop empathy, leadership and become advocates for social justice and civic engagement. Her leadership and vision at 4C LAB has impacted over 18,000 youth and community members since 2016.
Marissa has been featured in a cover story of the NY Times and Vanity Fair in recognition for her leadership and championing the value of representation, equity and inclusion across all media and artistic platforms. She is the 2018 recipient of the Jubilation Foundation Fellowship Award and was recognized by The Ford Motors Company in their “Unstoppable: Latina On The Move” national campaign. Marissa was selected for the 2024 ArtEquity National BIPOC Leadership Circle as well as receiving the honors as the Civic Grand Marshall for the Azusa Golden Days Parade for her dedication to civic and community work.
Marissa Herrera has become a visionary force by blending creative leadership, cultural storytelling, and youth empowerment. Whether through nonprofit programming, community and cultural engagement or theatrical productions, she consistently uplifts underrepresented voices, inspires the next generation of artists, and builds vibrant, inclusive communities. For more information please visit www.marissaherrera.net
A movement and spoken word workshop that allows us to define grief and grief not to define us.
What you expect participants to gain: to identify how grief shows up in our bodies and learn artistic tools to process and express our experiences.
Who you are honoring with your work: My mother, Rosie Herrera.

Angie Emily Joseph

Angie Emily Joseph was born and raised in Naples, Florida to Haitian parents. Her family had the mentality that it takes a village to raise a child, so she was really raised with over 15 distinct parent figures and 10 sibling figures. Angie also comes from an agricultural background. Growing up, she would spend time with her grandfather in his outdoor vegetable garden for hours on end. Because of this, her work uses vibrant and bold colors while also pulling inspiration from nature. Other themes of her work includes family, her Haitian culture, and emergence. Though she dabbles in most mediums, she is known for her use of water-based media and use of transparency.
Participants will be given prompts to create structures from various shapes made of wood that can slot into one another. This portion of the activity would be based on creating a physical "body of memories" of what is being mourned. Then, participants will use watercolors to paint the shapes/body of memories created with the wood - using colors they select and attribute to memories they have of that individual.

I hope participants take away that even though the person may be gone, the memories they left can live on. While making and creating together, I hope the participants can create these abstract shapes that are individually meaningful and unique as the person lost.

Anna Luisa Petrisko

Anna Luisa Petrisko (she/her) is an artist, musician, and healer. Her work spans sound, performance, video, sculpture, and ritual. She investigates the body as a site of paradox - transcendent of time and space. With roots in community and collaboration, she builds spaces of cultural memory and spiritual connection. She has over 25 years of study and teaching in body-based practices and healing arts such Yoga, Meditation, Sound Healing, Dance, and Somatics. She has her own dedicated spiritual practice that includes annual silent meditation retreats and pilgrimages to temples of devotion. Through her work, she studies and distills various spiritual and artistic practices to create a unique communal healing experience.
This workshop invites participants on a gentle journey of heart opening and deep relaxation through sound and movement. We begin with practices to settle the body and stimulate the vagus nerve, creating a calm and safe foundation for the heart to open. Through guided movement and sound-making, we connect with the heart center, cultivating resonance, joy, and love, while also holding space for grief. The experience concludes with a restorative sound bath, where ocean drum, chimes, and singing bowls support integration, release, and cellular healing.
What you expect participants to gain:
Participants can expect to leave feeling more grounded, open-hearted, held, and deeply nourished—through sound, movement, and rest.
Who you are honoring with your work:
We are honoring the intelligence of the body, the resilience of the heart, and the ancestral echoes of sound and movement as pathways to healing—while offering a space for connection, softness, and joy.

Suhn Lee

Suhn Lee is a Los Angeles based artist with a focus in ceramics and textiles. Her work is heavily influenced by her Korean American upbringing and her culture’s obsession with image and overachievement. Her repetition-driven practice synthesizes material exploration into a process akin to a physical mantra of transmuting suffering into a reverence for the present moment. Each piece is meticulously constructed from countless individual parts with an intentional disregard for time saving techniques. The slow nature of her work is, in part, an act of silent rebellion against society’s preoccupation with productivity.
Lee received a B.A. in Communications from UC San Diego and graduated Cum Laude from Southwestern Law School. She has a legal background in Intellectual Property licensing and experience in Fashion Buying and Merchandising. She has recently exhibited at Patricia Sweetow Gallery, Los Angeles; Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Los Angeles; Space Ten Gallery, Hawthorne; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions’s (LACE) Art Benefit; LH Horton Jr Gallery, Stockton; and completed residencies at the Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts and Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Maine.
Lee currently teaches ceramics and serves as the Contemporary Clay Minor Area Head at Otis College of Art and Design.
In this two part workshop, participants will make a cup a token of remembrance and communication with someone they lost. In the first session, participants will be guided through handbuilding and painting a cup out of clay. The cup will be fired and returned to participants in the final session where we will have a mindful tea drinking ceremony to remember and "take in" the person we lost.
What you expect participants to gain:
- Participants will experience the tactile healing power of working with a material directly with your hands and walk away with a physical object that they can use to commune with someone they lost.
- An understanding that we can still connect with those who are no longer physically with us as long as we open our hearts and minds in mindful meditation to discover (rediscover) what they left within us
Who you are honoring with your work: I honor our collective grief and the present moment as well my father who led me to Dharma.