Meet Noelle
My Journey
As the founder of Sacred Space, I create collective experiences that live at the intersection of creative expression, healing, and embodied liberation.
Over the past two decades, my work has been deeply interdisciplinary: I create theatre & ritual, facilitate collective spiritual practice, organize cultural gatherings and teach performance and writing. Alongside leading this work, I have continued to nurture my internal artistic & spiritual growth with lineages of teachers, healers and community organizations, so that I may to continue to offer outwards with aliveness and care.
Staying committed to a creative and spiritual path has held me through chronic health issues, the rite-of-passage of becoming a mother, and in offering healing to my ancestral lineages. It has guided me to step into my authentic self and truth, so that I am able to show up for family, community and our earth with greater attunement and presence.
Foundations
And…the foundations of my journey began long before adulthood. I was raised internationally: between Michigan, Germany and France, with many summers in Omaha, Nebraska, where my mother was born and raised as well as on my ancestral homelands in Lebanon, in the Chouf mountains and by the Mediterranean Sea, where my father was born and raised. At the age of 11, I was introduced to the works of Khalil Gibran and Mahmoud Darwish. The mysticism of their poetry and experiences of exile from their homelands of Lebanon and Palestine had a deep impact of me. Around this time, I also became more attentive to learning about the movement for Palestinian liberation through my father. My mother was my art teacher until we moved to Germany when I was 10 and a painter herself; she always encouraged me to tap into my creative & spiritual intuition, nurturing my love of the performing arts.
These early experiences of growing up amidst and within multiple cultures, including my own experiences as a Lebanese-American living in Europe, were interwoven with creative exploration, embodied learnings of the histories of migration and colonization of my ancestors and connection to ancient land-based mysticism of Cana’an. The experiences continue to inform who I am today. A constant thread (amidst much movement) was a feeling of belonging in the multitude of communities I was a part of. So, no matter where I was, I carried a sense of home within and around me.
The weaving of these creative, cultural, ancestral and spiritual journeys have laid the groundwork for SacredSpace.
The work of SacredSpace lives at the threshold-
Between the worlds we have inherited and the ones we are longing to create
I believe in the transformative possibilities when gathering in community. In the quiet and the playful. In the intangible and the material. I trust in the intuition of the body, the heart of the earth, and the guidance of ancestors and spirit. These are the guiding forces of each SacredSpace gathering.
The work of SacredSpace brings together sacred play, ancestral and earth based ritual, meditation, collective altar building, creative expression and simple acts of collective belonging.
My practice
My work, as the founder of SacredSpace, lives amidst, in between and within all kinds of borders, from Brooklyn to Palestine, high schools across Turtle Island / United States, detention centers such as Rikers Island and many theatres, community gardens, public parks and community spaces from Lebanon to France. I have partnered with organizations such as UNESCO, The New York Public Library, EmergeNYC, Queens Museum, The Freedom Theatre, Holes in the Wall Collective, LubDub Theatre and many others. I love collaboration.
Currently, I live in Brooklyn / Lenapehoking on the unceded lands of the Lenape people, where I have been rooted the past 19 years. I am a mama of two and a caregiver, tending to the many ecosystems I am a part of with slowness and care. Grateful to practice living with humbleness and humility each day and endlessly inspired by the magic and mystery of sacred aliveness. Closely guided by the mysticism, histories, land and waters of my ancestral lineages in Lebanon and beyond:
I walk with the guidance of ancestors
with spiritual practice as a compass
An ongoing commitment to unlearning and remembering to tend the threads that connect body, land and spirit…
With SacredSpace, we weave healing, creative intuition and sacred connection into the fabric of our everyday lives—into our communities, our movements for liberation, and the ways we build and sustain our organizations and shared futures.
I look forward to connecting with you and envisioning together.