Who's Who

My art, my spirituality, my work in health care, my desire to be a stepping stone in building community as well as my own personal healing are all interlaced.

My art, like my life tends to be rather eclectic. In my younger years I studied drama and dance at Henry Street Settlement N.Y. as well as teaching art classes to children of the Lower East Side.

I am a doll maker, a painter, I do stained glass, mosaic tile, and I sculpt.
For decades I have been intimately involved in the AIDS epidemic and geriatrics, working in home health care, mostly for people at the end of their life, caring not just for their bodies, but their spirits. This often was achieved through a wide spectrum of various artistic mediums, from painting, dancing, writing, drawing, story telling and music.

My work at Shands is a tapestry woven together of my artistic ability, my creativity and my life experience. It is my belief that a very profound kind of healing takes place when one is immersed in their art. There is a sense of empowerment when one recognizes oneself as an artist. I am not speaking physical cure, it is a shift I feel and have seen at an emotional and spiritual level.

Part of what I do at the hospital is building community. Working on the heart transplant unit has been a dance in itself, as patients come together through their art and their circumstances to become each others ‘family’. These ties often last long after the transplant.

I recently returned from a month working as a visiting artist in rural Tanzania, East Africa. Part of my time was teaching doll making at the Imbaseni free library. This was a beautiful example of community building as over 100 villagers-- young, old, women, men and children came together with a common interest.

After returning from Africa I founded and created Dollies without borders, a program in which people are making cloth dolls (reflecting the children's ethnicity) by hand, for orphans in developing countries. We started with doll circles (like old time Quilting bees) at the hospital and in my home, where as a community we could make dolls for the thousands of AIDS orphans in Africa. Dolls have gone to Kenya and Tanzania in east Africa and Uganda. As the program continues to expand, dolls have also been given to children in Peru and Thailand, with still more doll trips planned for the future.

www.dollieswithoutborders.com