Case Study: TOLAH — Designing Space for Collective Grief

Case Study: TOLAH — Designing Space for Collective Grief

On October 27, 2018, eleven people were murdered at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh — the deadliest antisemitic attack in American history. In the days and weeks that followed, the neighbourhood needed something that didn't exist yet: a structured but open space where people could be together, publicly, without prescription.

That space needed to be designed. And then, later, expanded.

Most of my most widely published photographs came from the coverage and documentation of this period — work that reached outlets including ABC Good Morning America, NBC News, CBS Sunday Morning, CNN, BBC, The Guardian, NPR, Bloomberg, and many more.

Phase one: the outdoor living room

In the immediate aftermath of the attack, I organised and built a 30-day outdoor living room outside the Tree of Life Synagogue. I worked to get donations from around Pittsburgh — tents, chairs, blankets, tea and cookies — to create a physical space where people could sit together outside the building where the massacre had happened.

I brought in friends who were pastors and rabbis to be present for people arriving from across Pittsburgh, across the United States, and from around the world. I had musicians come to play for people in the space. We offered free hugs and free tea and created an atmosphere where anyone could arrive, sit, be heard, and leave when they were ready.

The work was grounded in a deep commitment to understanding trauma, not just responding to it. My mentor and longtime friend Lisa Lopez Levers — a leading authority on trauma and professor at Duquesne University — mentored me through this period, helping me understand the psychology of what was happening for people in the space. I attended workshops on trauma response and participated in meetings with spiritual leaders to understand what the community actually needed, rather than what seemed helpful from the outside.

The installation drew on open-space technology, human-centered design, and agile organisational principles — frameworks I had studied during my Industrial Design training and applied in conferences and community events throughout my career. The approach worked because it prioritised what participants needed to bring to the space, not what the organisers had decided they should find there.

The project concluded with a concert. Photography from this period was selected for a juried group exhibition at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York.

Phase two: the Fringe Festival art festival

The work extended into Pittsburgh's Fringe Festival, where I co-organised a three-day outdoor living room and art festival promoting radical listening and healing. This was a larger and more complex production — more than 40 volunteers creating art across multiple forms simultaneously.

The programme included projection art, sidewalk chalk murals, experimental theatre, live music, and a bonfire. There were multiple tents for art-making. Social tokens of exchange programmes were built to help people open up in the space and connect across difference. The goal was the same as phase one — creating conditions for presence and connection — but with the expanded resources of a festival structure and a community that had had months to begin processing what had happened.

What it required

Coordinating 40+ volunteers across multiple simultaneous art forms, within a festival context, around subject matter this weighted, requires more than production skills. It requires a genuine commitment to understanding how people process difficult experience — and the discipline to create conditions for that processing without directing the outcome.

Lisa Lopez Levers's mentorship shaped how I understood this responsibility. Her work on trauma theory informed every structural decision in the project: the emphasis on voluntary participation, the multiple modalities of engagement, the absence of a single prescribed narrative, the presence of music and fire and food as grounding elements.

The skills I used here — systemic thinking, team coordination, human-centered design, deep listening before acting — are the same skills I bring to every creative direction project. The stakes were higher than most. The discipline was the same.

Creative direction and community-centred project work available for cultural organisations, institutions, and social enterprises. Contact via this site.