Mapping Grief, Building Altars: An Interfaith Workshop

Mapping Grief, Building Altars: An Interfaith Workshop is a free, virtual gathering that brings together participants across spiritual, religious, and secular identities to process grief through storytelling and collective creative practice. Participants will co-create a digital grief map and communal altar, exploring how faith, spirituality, or secular frameworks shape experiences of loss while fostering connection across difference. This project creates an accessible space for interfaith dialogue, shared healing, and meaningful community building.

Interfaith cooperation is central to this project, bringing together participants and guest speakers from diverse religious, spiritual, and secular backgrounds to engage across differences with respect and curiosity. The workshop is intentionally designed to uplift and honor a range of belief systems, beginning with guest facilitators sharing on how faith or lack thereof shapes experiences of grief and end-of-life care. Participants will then engage in shared dialogue and collaborative art-making, building meaningful relationships through the shared storytelling and creative expression.

Through the co-creation of a Digital Grief Altar and Visual Grief Map, participants actively collaborate across differences toward a shared outcome that reflects collective loss, and care. This process fosters mutual inspiration, deep listening, and a sense of connection rooted in our shared humanity. In this way, the project embodies interfaith cooperation by transforming individual grief into a collective, creative practice that serves the common good.

About Annah Kuriakose

Annah Kuriakose is a Princeton Seminary graduate who is also trained as a teacher and physician. Her work has focused on creating equitable access to health and education for underserved populations, with a particular passion for curating conditions and curricula to support physical, mental, and spiritual health. Recently, she published a children’s book about Indian Orthodox Christian funeral liturgies to explore how communal grief practices can help to create space for loss. You can find Annah on LinkedIn and her website.

About Gavin Chase

Gavin (he/him) is a first-year doctoral student at Villanova University, where his research sits at the intersection of religion, ecology, and the end-of-life. Working primarily in agricultural contexts, he explores how care for the more-than-human world shapes and informs the ways individuals and collectives can approach mortality with dignity, ecological sustainability, and emotional honesty. 

In 2025, Gavin composed and performed a three-track piece at the Lewis Center for the Arts (Princeton University) titled “Antiphonies for the Dying Fowl.” The work weaves together interviews with farmworkers, field recordings from a New Jersey farm, and neo-classical instrumentation—creating a soundscape that rests in the tension between gratitude and grief at the site (and sight) of animal death. 

About Mangda Sengvanhpheng

Mangda Sengvanhpheng is the founder of BACII - a platform that focuses on loss and grief while providing services and offerings for individuals, communities, and organizations that renew our engagement to life. As a certified death doula from Going With Grace and contemplative care practitioner through the NY Zen Center, she has seven years working in the end-of-life field along with over a decade of experience working in the creative and healing arts. Mangda’s work has been featured in VICE, Vogue, Architectural Digest, NY Mag’s  Curbed, and more.

This gathering is made possible by Interfaith America.