free gathering
GRIEF and Photography
A live, COMMUNITY CONVERSATION with Dr. Paul Koudounaris – a photographer chronicling death, beauty, and the divine.
From ancient tombs to roadside graves, Dr. Paul has traveled the world documenting the visual culture of death in its most sacred environments. Join us for a free conversation about how death becomes art, how beauty emerges from mortality, and what happens when sacred and macabre intersect.
Co-led by:
Lauren Carroll & Lauren Seeley
August 14 at 10am mountain time
held on Zoom
recording available
"It is sometimes said that death is the last taboo, but it was not always so."
Dr. Paul Koudounaris has spent over a decade documenting death across thirty countries, discovering how different cultures integrate mortality into daily life. From Bolivia's festival where families dress up skulls and offer them cigarettes, to Indonesian households that include mummified relatives in their daily routines, his work reveals a world where death isn't hidden away - it's celebrated, honored, and woven into the fabric of living.
This conversation will explore the overlap between Paul's discoveries and our own grief experiences. How do these death practices around the world inform how we might approach our own losses? What can ornate catacomb saints and bone churches teach us about honoring our dead? And how might understanding these global traditions expand our relationship with mortality?
Come curious about the beautiful, the macabre, and the sacred. Paul will share insights from his travels and research, while the Laurens guide us through what these death practices might teach us about grief, remembrance, and finding beauty in what we typically fear. This isn't just about other cultures - it's about expanding how we see death and loss in our own lives.
*All photos by Dr. Paul Koudounaris
Your FACILITATORS
Lauren Seeley
Lauren Seeley is an artist, death and grief doula, and death educator whose work weaves together death literacy, spiritual practice, and end-of-life care. Her interests and research span the tender edges of both human and pet end-of-life care, LGBTQIA+ and trans-centered deathwork, memory care, ritual and ceremony, and the many ways we honor the dead through funerary and disposition practices. Lauren currently works at a funeral home in Brooklyn, NY, where she holds space for the living and the dead, and facilitates the Silent Book Club of Death, Brooklyn’s quiet little refuge for readers who aren’t afraid to sit with the big questions.
Lauren Carroll
Lauren Carroll, co-founder of La Mort, is a Death Educator & Holistic Funeral Director who is passionate about weaving community and family back into the death space. Her work centers around re-aligning our culture with Mother Earth and helping humans remember how to love one another. She is a former board member for the National Home Funeral Alliance and co-founded The Deathwives. She lives on an urban farm at the base of a mountain where she tends to her animals, raises her two children, and dances around bonfires on the full moon with friends while listening to Nick Cave.
see death transformed into art. Explore beauty in the macabre.
Recording available for all registrants.
We can't wait to meet you.
LIVE community conversation
August 14 at 10am mountain time
Our Teaching / Learning / Creating Style at La Mort
We leave behind the polished, gate-keepy approach to education. We teach in ways that carry story and experience. We listen. We laugh (a lot). We go off-script sometimes. We cry (with you)(for those you’ve loved)(for those we’ve loved). We like science and studies and logical frameworks, but also mysticism and poetry and all that stuff. We really love to honor history and those who came before. We move through some serious curricula, but don’t take anything too seriously. We dedicate ourselves to seeing you, and want you to feel seen. We deeply honor our intuition and yours. We lead with integrity (always). And we welcome the odd-balls and misfits, because it takes one to know one.