Caitlin Doughty
Mortician, Founder
Caitlin Doughty
Mortician, Founder
Mortician Caitlin Doughty founded the Order of the Good Death in 2011 to bring discussions of mortality back into the public sphere. In the years since, the group has grown into the death positive movement. Caitlin is also the host and creator of “Ask a Mortician” and the New York Times best-selling author of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. She lives in Los Angeles, where she co-owns a funeral home, Clarity Funerals. To read more, go to caitlindoughty.com. For speaking engagement and press requests only, please email Tara Perez at taraatthegooddeath (at) gmail.com.
Sarah Chavez
Director, Order of the Good Death
Sarah Chavez
Director, Order of the Good Death
Sarah is the co-host of the Death in the Afternoon podcast, a founder and board member of the Collective for Radical Death Studies, a new collective which views their death work as anti-racist work, and is working toward decolonizing death studies and practices, as well as the co-founder of feminist death site Death & the Maiden. As one of the founders of the Death Positive movement, she is passionate about addressing the underlying issues that adversely effect marginalized communities’ experiences of death. Sarah speaks and writes about the relationship between food and death, Mexican-American death history, and the intersection of feminism and death. For speaking engagement and press requests please email Tara Perez at taraatthegooddeath (at) gmail.com.
Louise Hung
Producer & Writer
Louise Hung
Producer & Writer
Louise is a regular contributor to the blog and writes/researches scripts for Ask a Mortician. Prior to this, Louise wrote xoJane’s Creepy Corner column where, among other things, she wrote about death, folklore, and her personal experiences with both. Previously a writer for Catster.com, Louise was their unofficial feline death care “specialist” covering pet hospice and palliative care, pet burial/cremation/memorial options, and cats in death legend.
Megan Rosenbloom
Director, Death Salon
Megan Rosenbloom
Director, Death Salon
Megan is a medical librarian at the University of Southern California, managing the history of medicine and rare book collections. In 2013, she co-founded Death Salon, the practical arm of the Order of the Good Death. Death Salon, which Megan directs, aims to open up intellectual conversations on death & culture by holding public events in the spirit of the 18th-century salon. Email: Megan (at) deathsalon.org
Caroline Reilly
Social Media Content Contributor
Caroline Reilly
Social Media Content Contributor
Caroline is a Boston-based reproductive justice advocate, recent law school graduate, and macabre maiden. She regularly
Founding Members
Stephanie Smith
Web Design
Stephanie Smith
Web Design
Stephanie is the woman responsible for building and designing the Order’s website. She is also a composer, recently of CalArt’s MFA program in Experimental Sound Practices. Her album “Night Travels” was composed using violin, voice, and a Doepfer Dark Energy synthesizer.
Landis Blair
Artist + Editor
Landis Blair
Artist + Editor
Landis Blair is an illustrator and author known for his addiction to crosshatching and his stories of nihilistic whimsy. He is the writer and illustrator of The Envious Siblings: and Other Morbid Nursery Rhymes, as well as the illustrator of Caitlin Doughty’s book, From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death, and the graphic novel The Hunting Accident, by David Carlson. Additionally, Blair is also the editor on the Ask a Mortician Youtube series.
Katrina Spade
Eco-Death Revolutionary
Katrina Spade
Eco-Death Revolutionary
Katrina Spade is the founder and CEO of Recompose, a benefit
corporation developing a new form of death care that transforms bodies
into soil. Katrina is an Echoing Green Climate Fellow. She lives in
Seattle with her girlfriend and their two kids.
Pia Interlandi
Grave Garment Designer
Pia Interlandi
Grave Garment Designer
Pia is an Australian fashion designer. Her project [A]Dressing Death: Garments for the Grave researched (alongside a specialist forensics team) the effects of clothing and textiles on decomposition. Pia now designs custom made bio-degradable burial garments with client family participation. She is also a certified funeral celebrant who worked in London with Clandon Wood Natural Burial Reserve.
Jae Rhim Lee
Mushroom Decomposer
Jae Rhim Lee
Mushroom Decomposer
Jae Rhim is a visual artist, designer, and researcher. She created the Infinity Burial Project, training a unique strain of an edible mushroom to decompose and remediate toxins in human tissue. She also developed a decomposition ‘kit,’ and a membership society devoted to the promotion of death acceptance and the cultivation of decomposing organisms.
Paul Koudounaris
International Corpse Explorer
Paul Koudounaris
International Corpse Explorer
Paul is an author and photographer in Los Angeles. His PhD in Art History has taken him around the world to document charnel houses and ossuaries. His books of photography include The Empire of Death and Heavenly Bodies, which features the little known skeletons taken from the Roman Catacombs in the seventeenth century and decorated with jewels by teams of nuns. His other academic interests include Sicilian sex ghosts and demonically possessed cats.
Vanessa Ruiz
Street Anatomist
Vanessa Ruiz
Street Anatomist
Vanessa is trained medical illustrator, curator, and all out anatomy fanatic. She created Street Anatomy while getting her Master of Science in Biomedical Visualization. Street Anatomy brings anatomical illustration out of the medical world and into the art world, curating events and gallery shows.
Bess Lovejoy
Writer, Editor
Bess Lovejoy
Writer, Editor
Bess Lovejoy is the author of Rest in Pieces: The Curious Fates of Famous Corpses (Simon & Schuster, 2013) and an editor at mental_floss. She often writes about burial grounds of marginalized people, repatriated bodies, the history of bodysnatching in the U.S., and celebrity entrails.
Sarah Wambold
Conservation Burial Pioneer
Sarah Wambold
Conservation Burial Pioneer
Sarah Wambold is a writer and funeral director in Austin, TX. She was also caretaker at Eloise Wood, Central Texas’ only natural burial cemetery. Sarah’s work on The Order includes the essay series American Funeral Home Revolution and Real American Death Hero.
Jeff Jorgenson
Green Mortuary Owner
Jeff Jorgenson
Green Mortuary Owner
Jeff worked for years in the corporate funeral industry in Seattle, doing everything from pre-need sales to cemetery management. Fed up with how the death industry maintained outdated traditions, he struck out on his own, founding the Pacific Northwest’s first eco-friendly funeral home, Elemental Cremation & Burial. Elemental specializes in carbon neutral cremation & green burials. You can find him in the Is It Legal? video series.
Judy Melinek
Forensic Pathologist
Judy Melinek
Forensic Pathologist
Dr. Judy Melinek is a board-certified forensic pathologist doing autopsies for the Alameda County Sheriff Coroner, and is CEO of PathologyExpert Inc., a medicolegal consult firm. Her memoir, Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner, co-authored with her husband, writer T.J. Mitchell, is a New York Times Bestseller. They live, write and raise their three children in San Francisco.
Elizabeth Harper
Chronicler of Dead Saints
Elizabeth Harper
Chronicler of Dead Saints
Elizabeth is a writer and independent scholar focused on folk Catholicism and Catholic death rituals. She’s lectured on the Italian Cult of the Dead as part of the Bishop Walter F. Sullivan Catholic Studies lecture series and contributed to Virginia Commonwealth University’s World Religion and Spirituality project. Her essays and photos have been published on Lapham’s Roundtable, Slate, Atlas Obscura, and Killing the Buddha. Her blog, All the Saints You Should Know, has been profiled in Los Angeles Magazine and VICE Italia. She is currently a scholar in residence at the Morbid Anatomy Museum in Brooklyn, New York.
John Troyer
Director, Center for Death + Society
John Troyer
Director, Center for Death + Society
John Troyer is the Deputy Director of the Centre for Death and Society at the University of Bath. His research focuses on contemporary memorialisation practices, concepts of spatial historiography, and the dead body’s relationship with technology. He is a co-founder of the Death Reference Desk website and a frequent commentator for the BBC.
Nancy Caciola
Professor, Medieval Death
Nancy Caciola
Professor, Medieval Death
Nancy is a medieval historian and Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego. Her first book, Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages, concerns saints, demoniacs, and spirit possession in medieval culture. Her most recent book is Afterlives: The Return of the Dead in the Middle Ages, is an examination of medieval beliefs about death, afterlife, and ghosts. Both are available from Cornell University Press.
Ariel Hart
Animator
Ariel Hart
Animator
Ariel is an animator and illustrator in LA, working for clients as diverse as Justin Timberlake and Nike. She has a masters in experimental animation from CalArts and is the movin’ picture lady (i.e corpses in space) for the Ask a Mortician series.
Joanna Ebenstein
Founder, Morbid Anatomy
Joanna Ebenstein
Founder, Morbid Anatomy
Joanna Ebenstein is a Brooklyn-based artist, curator, writer, designer, and independent scholar. She is the creator of the Morbid Anatomy blog, library and event series, and was cofounder (with Tracy Hurley Martin) and creative director of the recently shuttered Morbid Anatomy Museum. She is author of The Anatomical Venus; co-editor (with Colin Dickey) of The Morbid Anatomy Anthology, and is currently working on a book about art and death to be released this October with Thames and Hudson. Ebenstein’s writing and photography have been published and exhibited internationally, and she speaks regularly around the world on topics at the intersections of art and medicine, death and culture. She has also acted as consultant for The Wellcome Collection and The New York Academy of Medicine.
Chanel Reynolds
End-of-Life Activist
Chanel Reynolds
End-of-Life Activist
Chanel is the founder of Get Your Shit Together. After becoming a widow and single mother when her husband was killed in an accident in 2009, Chanel turned tragedy into action, creating a hub to give others the power to create wills, living wills, insurance and basic financial planning, thus removing mountains of what she calls ‘optional suffering’ at death.
Greg Lundgren
Architectural Monument Designer
Greg Lundgren
Architectural Monument Designer
Greg is a Seattle-based artist, designer and curator with a diverse background in architectural design, sculpture, furniture and installation art. Greg Lundgren Monuments challenges ideas of memorialization – designing custom cast glass and granite monuments, modern urns and caskets, and producing original, thought provoking group exhibitions in their Seattle boutique. Greg has authored two illustrated children’s books addressing death and the cemetery.
Tanya Marsh
Funeral + Cemetery Law Expert
Tanya Marsh
Funeral + Cemetery Law Expert
Tanya is a Professor at Wake Forest University School of Law. She is a licensed attorney in the State of Indiana and a licensed funeral director in the State of California. She teaches the only course in a U.S. law school on funeral and cemetery law. Tanya is the author of The Law of Human Remains(2015), the first treatise on the subject in 70 years, and the co-author of Cemetery Law: The Common Law of Burying Grounds in the United States (2015), the first casebook in the subject. She is the founder and primary author of The Funeral Law Blog.
Kelly Christian
Postmortem Photography Researcher
Kelly Christian
Postmortem Photography Researcher
Kelly is a Chicago-based researcher, writer, and artist. Her most recent work explores the social history of death in American culture, as well as postmortem and memorial photography. Kelly photographed military funerals in Maine during the height of the Iraq War, and has created her own new media-Daguerreotypes. She has presented her work at conferences and galleries across the country. She is currently a Staff Writer at Dilettante Army, has written for the blog National Museum of Civil War Medicine, as well as other publications.
Cassandra Yonder
Death Midwife
Cassandra Yonder
Death Midwife
Cassandra lives on a self-sustaining homestead in Nova Scotia, Canada. She is a practicing Death Midwife, focusing on home funerals and alternative body dispositions. Cassandra is a Canadian representative to the National Home Funeral Alliance.
Barbara Chung
Smell of Death Research
Barbara Chung
Smell of Death Research
Barbara is a practising architect based in Melbourne, Australia. Her final design thesis during her studies was about how the stigma behind death should be reversed and seen as something that is sensorial and sublime by linking olfactory triggers within architecture. Barbara’s project ‘The Anamnesis of Being’ – A Mortuary Bathhouse, was shortlisted by the international Design for Death competition run by Designboom.
Colin Dickey
Author of the Macabre
Colin Dickey
Author of the Macabre
Colin Dickey is the author of Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places (Viking), plus two previous books of nonfiction: Cranioklepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius, and Afterlives of the Saints: Stories from the Ends of Faith. He is also the co-editor (with Joanna Ebenstein) of The Morbid Anatomy Anthology. He teaches writing at National University.
Melissa Cooper
Forensic Artist
Melissa Cooper
Forensic Artist
Melissa is a California- based forensic artist. She performs skull reconstructions, post-mortem illustrations, age progressions and composite sketches for organizations ranging from law enforcement agencies to museums. Melissa has a background in taxidermy and anthropology and curates and shares macabre wonders a’plenty on the Order’s social media.
Nora Menkin
Co-Op + Nonprofit Funeral Homes
Nora Menkin
Co-Op + Nonprofit Funeral Homes
Nora Menkin is the Managing Funeral Director of the Co-Op Funeral Home of People’s Memorial in Seattle, one of the only not-for-profit funeral homes in the country. She has a background in home funerals and Jewish traditions, and a passion for natural burial and modern funeral practices.
Angela Kirkpatrick
Post-Mortem Jewelry Designer
Angela Kirkpatrick
Post-Mortem Jewelry Designer
Angela is a post-mortem jewelry designer and silver smith who resides in the Pacific Northwest. She incorporates cremated remains, hair, and teeth into custom modern jewelry designs inspired by Victorian Memento mori jewelry.
Jim Doran
Diorama Maker
Jim Doran
Diorama Maker
Jim is a metaphysicist, artist, and diorama maker in Baltimore. His wee pen and ink drawings in seemingly mundane places (Carmex jars, Altoid tins) show death and the macabre peeking through our everyday lives.
Rachel James
Writer, Editor
Rachel James
Writer, Editor
Rachel is a writer, editor, and public speaker located in California’s Gold Country. She is a founding partner of Odd Salon, a popular, often sold-out cocktail-hour series of lectures that regularly deliver on the promise that you will “Learn Something Weird.” She contributes regularly to projects such as Atlas Obscura, the definitive guidebook to the world’s most wondrous (and delightfully morbid) places. Rachel also founded Posy-Filled Pockets, best described as a “death positive variety show”.
John Carbone
Forensic Psychiatrist
John Carbone
Forensic Psychiatrist
John has over 24 years experience as a practicing mental health provider, specializing in general and forensic psychiatry. He is the Chief of Psychiatry and Director of Mental Health Services North Carolina Department of Correction for the Division of Prisons. This position involves clinical and administrative oversight of the largest single mental health provider in the state, serving over 40,000 incarcerated offenders, including those on death row.
Sarah Fornace
Dark Puppetry
Sarah Fornace
Dark Puppetry
Sarah is a Chicago based performer. She is co-founder of the live-scored cinematic shadow puppet troupe Manual Cinema, which creates dark spectacles such as Ada/Ava, a show about the death and mourning of two identical twins. Sarah is a trained narrative theorist, breaking, filtering, and re-ordering your mortician’s theories for over six years.
Annabel de Vetten
Morbid Cake Maker
Annabel de Vetten
Morbid Cake Maker
Formerly trained as a sculptor, a taxidermist, and painter, Annabel de Vetten, turned her creativity towards food art in 2011 and created Conjuror’s Kitchen. Drawing inspiration from her love of anatomy, alternative art and ossuaries and the horror genre, her cakes, chocolates and other edibles are delightfully disturbing. She has also created ‘Death in Chocolate’, a range of edible bird, small mammal, and human skulls, which she ships all over the world. Annabel’s work has been featured in Vice, Ripley’s Believe It Or Not and Archie McPhee.
The people you see here either work for the Order or were with us in the beginning. In that last nine years we have added an incredible number of death industry pioneers, and are lucky to be in collaboration with death positive groups across the world. If you would like to sign on to the movement, visit our Death Positive page.