Photo: Marisol Diaz
Work with Me
We need a world where people are rooted in their creative power as a way to drive real, community-driven system shifts. I create art and offer programs to serve and support vulnerable communities* to build new worlds through story, aesthetics, and poetic expression.
I offer workshops, training, coaching, and mentoring. I work with organizations, groups, institutions, and directly with individuals.
For organizations that want to experience or apply participatory storytelling, reflective writing, and embodied arts methods with their staff, students, or community partners, I facilitate and design workshops, professional development, and arts and wellness opportunities.
I consult with and design projects for community-based organizations, educational institutions, and social service providers.
I mentor cultural workers, arts educators, and women of color in career/life transitions to turn towards their memory, creative voice, and cultural traditions as doorways to our deepest creative selves.
Through collaborative exploration and expansive play, I create spaces where vulnerability becomes strength and where joyful trust nurtures creative flow. My approach remains grounded in understanding real-world conditions while maintaining a vision of what's possible when we work together to reshape these conditions for all life to thrive.
“Kayhan has been facilitating our flagship donor education program, the Thousand Currents Academy, for a couple of years. We bring together participants that include professionals in philanthropy, staff at foundations, donors and high-net-worth individuals, donor advisers, and other philanthropy professionals for a week-long, in-person exploration on how they can apply solidarity-based practices in their grantmaking and partnerships with grantees. Kayhan brings a powerful heart and body-centered facilitation style that opens up participants to a deeper exploration that is both generative and forward-looking. She includes different creative practices like collective & individual art & ritual making, journaling, personal reflections, nature-based work, and so much more to unlock aspects of our being that are sometimes not allowed to emerge in our professional lives, but that are always so informative and meaningful.
The result is that when participants make commitments to shifting their practices at the conclusion of the Academy, they do so from an intentional and embodied place, sitting fully in their power. Here is a facilitator who is so exquisitely grounded in her pedagogy and so assured that she allows others to shine."
- Rajiv Khanna, Thousand Currents, Vice President, Center for Transforming Philanthropy
“We invited Kayhan to facilitate a faculty writing retreat session. Kayhan is a talented community builder. Within a short time, she guided our group to deep conversations about life, work, purpose, and writing. Faculty gave rave reviews about Kayhan’s workshop, and we look forward to continuing to work with her at future sessions.”
- Tamara Issak. Director, Writing Across Communities and Assistant Professor, St. John’s University
Workshops for Groups
Ideal for classroom and workplace settings: I lead digital and in-person workshops that use participatory, story-based, and embodied practices for reflection, creative visioning, expanding a sense of wellness, and transforming how we reach and serve the communities we are woven into. By sharing the imagery and metaphors from our lives and cultures, we build new networks of belonging and strengthen our community-based work.
My clients usually come from organizations and government agencies specializing in education, community arts, health and human services, community organizing, and pre-service training programs such as law, public health, and teacher training. I bring 20+ years of deep group facilitation work to this offering, supporting groups who want to heal, build audience and allies, challenge internalized beliefs and patterns of working, and deepen practices of community education and knowledge creation.
Mentoring for Individuals
For socially engaged artists, educators, teaching artists, and professionals seeking creative change: I can guide and support your work to navigate institutions, plan and implement your projects/programming, create more expansive and culturally responsive community engagement practices, and deepen into your own knowledge and vision to utilize your gifts. I have done this work for 20+ years, deepening my one-on-one collaborative work to support individuals with professional and creative project management, career transitions, making the opportunities they seek, and more.
If you are a Theater of the Oppressed practitioner, I can help you translate these tools and delve into the work based on decades of training and work, including annual study and exchange with Augusto Boal himself.
Our work together may feature office hours, embodied and creative activities, and other strategies to co-design a maximally supportive relationship.
Mostly for women of color in major career/life transitions, I use creative visioning, writing, reflection, and embodied practices to turn towards memory, creative voice, and cultural life-ways as doorways to our deepest creative selves. Built on my pedagogy of Tor-Mor-Jor (The Break, The Turn, The Join), this offering allows you to find a lighthouse in yourself and the glimmers of hope that lie among the shards of fracture.
If you are in a moment of loss, chaos, or fracture and want to turn toward the wisdom and power that walks alongside you, this offering is for you. This approach may include workshops or one-on-one sessions.