Tara, MS

She/They

Program Catalyst

Tara (ติตา) has ancestral roots in the land of mangosteens, blue street doves, and heart-shaped leaves bursting through concrete. In her early adulthood, she pursued a masters education in mechanical engineering at Stanford University. She has since decided to stretch a little wider and grow a little deeper. Nowadays she has an annual migration pattern that takes her between her homes in Thailand and the Bay Area in order to learn and facilitate containers for liberatory healing, tending conflict, nurturing autonomous community, and tending to the grief and rage of her generation which is growing up in a world of constant crisis. She mostly works with labor union organizers, queer and trans artists, university students, farmers, and clear eyed, disobedient people.

At her center, Tara just wants to be in closer and more loving relationship with all the life that gives her life. During her time in industry she witnessed the depletion of people and land for our hyper-industrialized, take-based existence which helped her realize the deep need for, as well as the monumental challenge of, unlearning, transformation, and healing.

On this path, Tara has taken on the role of conscious maker, healing advocate, transformative justice practitioner, community organizer, budding agroecology farmer, facilitator, and multimedia artist. She is a steward of the Oakland-based, grassroots group The Sacred Maker Arts Collective in which she helps organize no money, barter-based ecomarkets, workshops for local QTBIPOC artists to teach their crafts, and transformative justice + art workshop series. 

In 2023 she founded Dujai Healing, a Bangkok-based, grassroots collective that seeks to disrupt cycles of interpersonal and societal violence through trauma education, transformative justice, decolonization, and expressive art. She is working on deepening her relationship with her friends that are rural farmers in Thailand to be able to collaborate with them to offer land-based, politicized healing experiences outside of the capital.

Tara believes that healing is often mysterious and elusive. Her healing practice invites people to join her in the space of metaphor and self-seeing that comes with art making, play, and crafting collective memory. She believes in the value of the wordless space, the pattern space, and the connection space.