animate the mystery 🎭
animate the mystery 🎭
move in poetry 🪶
move in poetry 🪶
our love and liberation intertwined always 🪢
our love and liberation intertwined always 🪢
Where
Detroit occupies the contemporary and ancestral homelands of the Ojibwe, the Ottawa, and Potawatomi
currently in Detroit, MI
Portrait by Loren Kmp Photography
About
Hi, I’m Veronica (she/they), an artist and space holder shapeshifting between mediums — poetry, video/animation, photography, performance — obsessed with the creative act itself.
Whether stringing words like beads or dancing in poetry, every creative act is about animating; this is why I call my flow state the cartoon world. In the cartoon world, everything is alive and connected!
We are all wounded by colonialism’s separation of creativity from the sacred and consciousness from the body. Through different practices, all my offerings hold space for people to reconnect to the consciousness of the living world through their ancestors, creativity, and body.
Whose work has created me? This is my web of mentors and elders.
I'm white, born in Oak Park, Illinois, homelands of the Ojibwe, Odawa, Potawatomi, Miami, Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Sac, and Fox. I've also called Iowa and Michigan home. A midwesterner at heart, I'm passionate about the climate futures of the Great Plains and Great Lakes.
I'm only beginning to uncover the stories intentionally buried by my people. On my paternal side, I am descended from Catholics of Croatian and Volga German descent, as well as Welsh and English immigrants. On my maternal side, my ancestors are Danish, Polish, German and Irish.
I have a BA from Grinnell College where I crafted an independent major in Narrative Studies to explore the liberatory potential of media and storytelling. For 5+ years, I’ve helped various kinds of organizations with communications and design projects.
Right Now 𖤓
Right Now 𖤓
the work is in reweaving
Currently, I’m designing and completing a DIY MFA in Detroit, exploring what learning led by my community and friends looks like. I’m also Detroit Disability Power’s Communications Coordinator. Disability Justice deeply informs the way I move, and I’m committed to building a world where our vulnerability is our social glue and source of power.
I also offer plant, energy, and ancestor work. At the core, all three modalities work with the understanding that consciousness, information, and healing move through energetic fields and relationships rather than just individual, isolated bodies. This means that transformation doesn't just happen "to you" - it happens in the relational space between you and these larger webs of life. From this perspective, most suffering comes from feeling cut off from these larger fields of support and wisdom. So the work becomes about remembering and reweaving the connections - to ancestors, the living world, and our bodies.
Plant medicine is not just ingesting a “substance” but entering into relationship with a consciousness that has mastered living in interconnected awareness; plants help us remember that our nervous systems are part of a larger ecosystem.
Ancestor work metabolizes pain across lineages — space and time. When we are in relationship with our ancestors, we are connected to a love that is bigger than history.
When we recognize how our energy affects everything around us, we understand our responsibility to tend to it — energy work provides practical tools for doing this.