ABOUT
ABOUT DENISE & THE EMPRESS PROJECT
ABOUT DENISE & THE EMPRESS PROJECT
ABOUT DENISE & THE EMPRESS PROJECT
ABOUT DENISE & THE EMPRESS PROJECT
She came to this work through living it.
Not primarily through a curriculum. Not through licensing & certifications alone. All of that studies and training I've completed may have help set a framework. But it is, through my own body, my own history, my own long walk toward understanding what was done, and what was always, underneath it all.
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THE FOUNDATION
It can't always only be about the trauma. It is the trauma, the knowing, AND the living.
The Empress Project was not born from research. It was born form a woman sitting with what her body had been carrying for decades. The adaptation, the smiles, the way I learned to move in each room/space I entered. It came from using creativity as a tending modality to come to a place of recognizing that what looked like personal struggle was something far older, far bigger, and far more shared than I had ever been told.
This works sits at the intersection of East Caribbean cultural identity, somatic intelligence, and the transformative power of creativity. It is wellness. It is therapy. But not in the way we have learned to recognise it. This version has us in mind.
This is an acknowledgement, an honouring of our experience that creates a tiredness in our bodies we understand as daily hustle. But its deeper(focused on the designed perspective) We were never meant to look too closely at it. So we have learned to carry it, named it strength, push through and keep moving . What leives underneath is layered nuances of duality, belonging, worth and relationships. This is what we tend here.
ROOTED
This work comes from lived experience.
LOVING
Our work here is not pathologizing our journey. It is about tending and
GENERATIVE
Creativity is our technology. A gentle modality toward insight that honours what you have already survived. Something new and rich grows here.
HER STORY
She move through the room looking for where she'd feel safe.
Somewhere in those days of isolation, I had declared I was going to tap into my creativity. I began my creativity journey with knitting, and that winter my family all received a misshapen toque or scarf with instructions, that they must wear at least once! - bless them.
I believe it was a late night scroll & search when I came across intentional creativity, and in the heat of the night I enrolled. Never had I painted before, and the descriptive did say no painting experience required. I was in, and gratefully, blown away by the newly gained insight and healing the paint, color, strokes, symbols, images, and compassionate inquiry provided me - It was (is) truly profound. During my training the news headlines and images plastered all across the world's screen was were screaming pandemic and racial hatred.
It was, and is a savings grace
Ive learned that there are times in our lives that within a life experience once you know, there is no going back to where you were, and what you believed -lived to be true. - It took me a long time to overcome personal fears of dealing with the magnitude of what is god-given to me, to bring intentional creativity through the Empress Project for racial healing, and know that the call to share the power of this work is greater than thoughts that say -who are you to do this.
Through creativity, I came to understand what was really happening, gently, without shame. And everything changed.
I come from a lineage of...
Creative + Expressive Practices
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Social Work
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Coaching
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Intergenerational & Ancestral Healing
family stories, honoring lineage, breaking cycles, and reconnecting to the wisdom we carry. ​
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Somatic + Embodied Healing Nervous -system attunement, body-based practices, polyvagal awareness, and the art of learning to trust your body again.
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Trauma-Informed, Decolonial, Community-Centered Frameworks - rooted in collective healing, anti-oppressive practices,
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Teachings from the women in my community, my mother, and hours expanding with Dr. Emma Coddington Brown.
I am deeply devoted to the liberation, healing, and creative flourishing of Caribbean women and women of the diaspora — women who have carried more than their share and deserve spaces built with them at the center.
I've brought what I've learned & experienced to the Empress Project.
A space I would have needed. A space I now hold for you, and a space we hold for one another.
Denise holds this space because she knows what it means to need it. And to finally find it.
if something in you recognizes something in this.
An open invitation is yours to be with me.
This space is for you.