The Gratitude Gathering, Day 3: Celebration
NOTE: This event is part of The Gratitude Gathering Retreat, which starts the evening of Nov. 20.
To register for this event: click “RSVP”, and you will be redirected to The Gratitude Gathering Retreat Registration page.
SUNDAY, NOV 22: CELEBRATION
8:30 - 10:00 am PST // 11:30 am - 1:00 pm EST
This is a day of celebration! This will be a time to appreciate all that you have experienced during the weekend, deepen your connections with your virtual family, and prepare for the holiday week ahead.
Celebration and Mourning - in Words and Movement co-hosted by Bea Martino, Reimagine event producer, multimedia artist and grief-advocate, Brad Wolfe, Reimagine Founder and Executive Director, Kristin Urquiza, activist and co-founder of Marked by COVID, and Sasha Soreff, choreographer and transformational facilitator
What brings you joy? What loss does your heart carry? Acknowledging moments of joy and experiences of loss and grief supports our nervous systems and enhances our sense of self-connection. Adding movement of any size helps us access our hearts and bodies. The combination of creative expression and empathic communication in community creates a powerful opportunity for deeper understanding and ultimately, healing. Choreographer and Transformational Facilitator Sasha Soreff will offer a gentle warm up, followed by discussion and movement exploration of that which we celebrate and mourn, individually and collectively. All movement invitations are non obligatory. Everything can be done seated, and can be enacted in any way that feels good to the participant, seated or otherwise.
Meet our hosts
Beatrice Antonie Martino / Reimagine
Beatrice (Bea) Antonie Martino (she/her) is a Reimagine event producer and Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary installation artist, choreographer, and grief activist. She specializes in crafting site-specific, multi-sensory experiences and interactive environments that hold space for introspection, emotional processing, and community connection. Working at the intersections of live performance and technology, she uses video art, projection, movement, and choreography to build worlds that encourage holistic engagement with our shared humanity. Her current work explores individual and collective relationships to grief and mourning, and seeks to create new healing rituals to honor the dead.
Bea's academic background includes B.A. degrees with honors in Dance and Psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an M.A. degree from New York University Gallatin School of Individualized Study (Artistic Thesis: What Remains: Ritual Spaces for the Contemporary Mourner). Driven by multiple experiences of significant personal loss, Bea has been exploring themes of grief, memory, loss, and identity in her creative work since 2007. In a society where death and grief are marginalized, she believes that we need to make more concerted efforts to create communal spaces in which people can process these experiences through ritual.
To engage with Bea’s work and learn more about her upcoming projects, please visit: https://www.beatricemartino.com.
Kristin Urquiza / Marked by Covid
Kristin Urquiza (she/her) is the Co-Founder and Chief Activist of Marked by COVID. She is a graduate of Yale University and UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy where she has a Master of Public Affairs. She is an environmental advocate at Mighty Earth, where she works to hold corporations like Cargill accountable to their industrial agricultural practices that displace indigenous people from their lands and drive deforestation in places like the Amazon rainforest and beyond. Additionally, Kristin works closely with Liberation in a Generation, a group working to narrow the wealth gap between people of color and white families in the United States within a generation.
Her grandparents were migrant farmworkers– from Mexico and Oklahoma — and her father worked in the fields as a child. She grew up in the Maryvale community of Phoenix, and is a proud product of public primary education and the first person in her family to go to college. Maryvale is a community of predominantly people of color and immigrants, and is now seeing the highest rates of COVID-19 in the nation, where people are waiting 13 hours to be tested.
Kristin’s parents contracted COVID-19 in June, following Governor Ducey’s downplay of the severity of the coronavirus and subsequent rollback of the state’s shelter-in-place ordinance. When her dad passed on June 30 from COVID-19 she launched Marked by COVID to honor her father, collect stories of people who have been impacted by COVID-19, and inspire safer public health policies. With the help of friends and family, she wrote the first #HonestObit, invited the governor to her dad’s funeral, and held a vigil at the state capitol. For more information about Kristin and Marked by COVID visit: https://markedbycovid.com.
Sasha Soreff
As Artistic Director of Sasha Soreff Dance Theater, Sasha has been creating and sharing multigenerational, participatory work on stages and in community for close to twenty years. Her work has been presented at an array of New York and New England venues, including Dixon Place, HERE, the Queens Museum of Arts, The JCC in Manhattan, and in performance by students at the Ailey School. She teaches at Gibney Dance Center and The International Partner Dance Intensive has been a frequent guest teacher at NYU’s Initiative for Women with Disabilities. Her classes and workshops are spaces of movement, storytelling, empathy, and playful curiosity. A Maine native, she studied modern dance at North Carolina School of the Arts and received a BA from Barnard College.
NOTE: Please make a suggested donation for this retreat. The free registration option is for attendees who can't afford a ticket at this time. As a nonprofit organization, we depend on ticket revenue to sustain this work.
