Hello! My name is Staci Bu Shea (b. 1988, Miami).

I’m a curator, writer, educator and consultant living in Utrecht, The Netherlands. For holistic death and grief care, visit the website of my practice stacibushea.care.

Broadly, I focus on aesthetic and poetic practices of social reproduction and care work, as well as its manifestations in interpersonal relationships and daily life, community organizing and institutional practice.

My debut book Solution 305: Dying Livingly as part of the Solution Series edited by Ingo Niermann was published in January 2025. Part studious, part visceral, Dying Livingly is a collection of short essays in service to an aesthetic and poetic experience of living life led by death, and was written in the first few years of my holistic deathcare practice. Order the book at your favorite local bookstore.

In 2019, I embarked on a study trajectory called Poetics of Living with art historian Rizvana Bradley to explore already existing and emerging non-normative forms of living together in consideration of rapidly changing discourses around sexuality, health, communal life, and death. In many ways, this forms the basis of my life practice and my interest in art and culture.

I’ve taught at Royal Academy of Art, The Hague (Dying Livingly, 2023-2024 and Situated and Dynamic: An Introduction to Curatorial Practice, 2023); Sandberg Institute (Towards Access, co-taught with Pernilla Manjula Philip, 2022-2023); Dutch Art Institute (All about my mother, co-tutored with Sepake Angiama and Nina bell F., 2020); and HKU MAFA, Utrecht Graduate School of Visual Art and Design (More than Friends: on belonging, access, and safe(r) spaces, co-tutored with Jeanne van Heeswijk, 2019). I am often an external reviewer here and there for graduation work and theses.  


I’m a contributor to Metropolis M. Find some of my writing published on their website, including Against Ageism but also Against Age: An Interview with Simon(e) van Sarloos (2023), A New Culture of Accessibility (with Mira Thompson, 2021), Learning from Grief (2021), and Care in Times of Care (2020).


From 2017-2022 I worked as a curator at Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons, an art institution based in Utrecht that focuses on collective art projects and organizational experiments. Together with the team I managed the exhibition program from concept writing and organization to working with artists and designing programs, but was also engaged in other areas of the institution. Noteably I sought to give attention and understanding to what’s kept in Casco’s analog and digital archive. I also worked to make Casco more accessible by implementing accommodations and fostering a culture of accessibility, testing what’s possible for a social, aesthetic experience of care while learning from and working with disability communities.

In the past, I co-curated Barbara Hammer: Evidentiary Bodies (2017) at Leslie Lohman Museum of Art (NY) with Carmel Curtis, which New York Times art critic Holland Cotter named one of the best exhibitions of that year. I graduated from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College with the group exhibition Emphasis Repeats (Andrea Geyer, Barbara Hammer, Alex Martinis Roe, and Tourmaline, 2016) at Hessel Museum of Art (NY). From 2011-2014 I worked as a studio manager and assistant to artist Jim Draper in Jacksonville, Florida.

If you’ve found yourself here, please leave a message for my guestbook :) 

Selected current work

The Sphinx’s Riddle, with Manifold Books, 2024-2025 (curated reading sessions):
28/01: to attend to
09/03: to dedicate to with Katja Mater
01/06: to attest to with Dagmar Bosma
05/10: to remember for with the Paul Hoecker Research Group
23/11: to pass on with Natalia Papaeva, hosted by Anna Arov
29/03: to live through with Moosje Moti Goosen

Selected past work

Summer Grief series, Metropolis M, 2024 (editorial):
00 Introduction by Staci Bu Shea
01 Lin by Chus Martínez
02 Ruben by Yessica van den Berg
03 Rami by Dina Mimi
04 Carla by Katja Mater
05 Epilogue by Jumana Emil Abboud

Visitor Report on Constantina Zavitzanos’ Entrophy with Angelo Custódio and Pedro Matias, S*an D. Henry-Smith and Geo Wyex, If I Can’t Dance, 2024 (text)

Cultivating esthesia, (Listen to the lecture on Cranberry Juice Podcast) for Written in the Body symposium, with Jewellery-Linking Bodies Department Gerrit Rietveld Academie in collaboration with VU/MC hospital in Amsterdam, 2024 (lecture)

Sweet, sweet fantasy, with Mira Thompson, 2023 (performance, text)

Never Seen, with Naima Abdullahi and Nimco Hersi, 2023 (commissioned film) 

CV of Care, for Curriculum Veto / CV van Toewijding, Dutch translation by Flora Valeska for nY50, 2022 (text)

Commoning Accessibility, with design by Lotte Lara Schröder, 2022 (text)

Barn’s burnt down–now I can see the moon, with CA Conrad, Camisha L. Jones, Ching-In Chen, 2021 (curated program)

Access Intimacy with Mia Mingus, 2021 (curated program)

Dying Livingly with Barbara Hammer, 2021 (lecture)

Het is of de stenen spreken (silence is a commons), with Babi Badalov, Ansuya Blom, Ama Josephine Budge, Mire Lee, and the Casco team, 2019 (exhibition)

Two Rubatos with Terre Thaemlitz, 2019 (exhibition)

Heroic in its ordinariness, with Elizabeth Atterbury, Beverly Buchanan, Taraneh Fazeli, Feminist Health Care Research Group, Carolyn Lazard, Redeem Pettaway, Falke Pisano, and Sasha Wortzel, 2019 (exhibition)

Army of Love, with Ingo Niermann, Dora García and more, 2017 (project exhibition)

Age lines, Kerry Downey, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Ilyana Ritchie, Mia You, and more, 2016 (exhibition)

Poetry bulletin

Karem Affirmation Cistern Don’t Be Afraid Keep Going Toward the Horror
by Gabrielle Calvocoressi

Remember how you didn’t fall yesterday
even though you thought you would?
Life can be like that all the time if you
let it. Remember all the balance beams
and the room full of stuffed animals
at the children’s hospital? How scary it
was and always dark? It was meant
to be comforting but you knew better
and survived it. That gauntlet of stuffed
animals leading to the physical therapy room.
So long ago. When you learned it’s okay
to hold out your hand and help someone up.
No matter what the factory or the nurses
tell you. A good thing to remember is that life
is an equal amount of doughnut shops
and roadkill every day. And if you see
the deer get hit you can call the tiger
rescue group and the deer will become
tiger food. Sometimes the things
that matter to you won’t matter
to anyone but you. And that’s redemption.
The poem that means nothing to anyone
but you. Like how your life was.
Like your bones that you kept safe
and the meatloaf you hid in the corner
of your mouth so it wouldn’t get stolen
off your plate. It is true that sometimes
you want to take the food off other people’s
plates. Let that sink in and then remember
it’s okay. To know you’re part craven smuggler.
Part thief. Maybe if you know your animal.
I mean really know your animal.
You won’t become a builder of factories
or slave ships. Maybe instead of building
a ship somewhere in your body
you just let yourself feel the pain and
humiliation. No need to make it beautiful
for some future reader. Just say how much
you wanted to hurt someone like you got hurt.
And then just watch that for a while. It’s okay
to feel horribly ashamed. Best not to look away.
The gate to joy is past the factory and past
the reader and maybe it’s past your last breath
on this planet. There’s nothing you can do about it.
You come from the cistern of brutality
and hunger. You are the resonator. Just breathe.

Source: Poetry (October 2025)

[aerial view of brown knapweed in the dry autumn grass, three spikey purple blooms in a tuff of deep green shrub.]