Order Members
Operations
Stephanie Cheng Smith
Stephanie is a composer, recently of CalArt’s MFA program in Experimental Sound Practices. She is also the woman responsible for building and designing the Order’s website.
Mara Zehler
Mara is a writer and editor, formerly of Flaunt magazine. She has appeared in Order videos, was shrouded and buried for a photoshoot, and currently edits blog content and social media for the Order’s website.
Funeral Professionals
Pia Interlandi
Pia is an Australian fashion designer whose project [A]Dressing Death: Garments for the Grave focuses on the process of scientifically decomposing textiles for burial. She is also a certified funeral celebrant who has recently moved to London to work with Clandon Wood Natural Cemetery.
Sarah Wambold
Sarah is a funeral director and embalmer in Austin, TX. After growing disillusioned with the current death business, she is opening her own funeral home that combines a place to process the dead with a gallery to showcase the local art community, a process she is documenting for the Order.
Jeff Jorgenson
Jeff began his career in the Seattle funeral industry after getting multiple degrees in Aeronautics. He worked for corporate firms for years before striking out on his own by starting Elemental Cremation & Burial, specializing in carbon neutral cremation & green burials.
Cassandra Yonder
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.
Academics
Lindsey Fitzharris
Lindsey is a medical historian at Queen Mary, University of London. She is the author & creator of The Chirurgeon’s Apprentice, a website dedicated to the horrors of pre-anestetic surgery and is currently filming a television series called “Medicine’s Dark Secrets.”
Alex Frankel
Alex is an assistant professor of economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Every day he scours the Internet and delivers pertinent death news to the Order. In addition, he is co-founder of the Order of the Good Death Resource Library, which features literature, art, and reference books from all genres of death.
John Troyer
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.
Barbara Chung
Barbara B Chung recently completed her Master of Architecture at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Her design thesis speculates the stigma behind death as something that is sensorial and sublime through linking olfactory triggers with architecture.
Will C White
Will is the assistant conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. He is a frequent contributor to the content of the Order, and has been a staunch supporter since Caitlin’s secret password-protected cremation blog, Salon of Souls, debuted to ten friends in 2008.
Megan Rosenbloom
Megan is a medical librarian at the University of Southern Calfornia in Los Angeles. Megan manages the history of medicine and rare book collections at USC and lectures on “The Grisly History of Sourcing Bodies for Anatomical Learning.” She is also a freelance photographer.
Writers
Bess Lovejoy
Bess Lovejoy is a writer, researcher, and editor based in Seattle. She has written about dead people and forgotten history for The New York Times and contributed to the The Believer, The Boston Globe, The Stranger. Her book Rest in Pieces: The Curious Fates of Famous Corpses comes out March 2013.
Susie Kahlich
Susie is an American writer living in Paris, France. In addition to reflecting on the different death customs found in Europe, her essays for the Order are chronicles of her fight to have non-traditional funerals for those closest to her, despite the bureaucracy of local funeral homes.
Sheera Talpaz
Sheera is is a writer and poet, getting her Phd in comparative literature at Princeton University. Her essays and poems contributed to the Order tend to focus on her well-known pernicious fear of her impending mortality.
Justin Nobel
Justin is a death writer and blogger at funeralwise.com. He writes on death customs for the likes of Time and Harper’s. He wrote the first article on your mortician, which still comes up when you Google her name.
Artists
David Forrest
David is a music theorist and creator of the Shapes Method. He does all the original music for the Ask a Mortician series, as well as for Death by Fame. He is the mortician’s existential confidant and has done everything from recording voiceovers to riding in the body van.
Angeline Gragasin
Angeline is an independent filmmaker and media maven at National Headquarters. She has directed two videos with the Order, The Ecstasy of Decay No. 1 & No. 2. She has also collaborated with Caitlin on multiple death-themed films and theater productions.
Will Slocombe
Will is a director and writer and the Events Coordinator at Film Independent. He shot Death by Fame and provided equipment and assistance on both Ecstasy of Decay films.
Sarah Fornace
Sarah is co-founder of the popular shadow puppet troupe Manual Cinema. She is also a trained narrative theorist, and the woman through which all of your mortician’s theories have been broken down, filtered through, and re-ordered for more than three years.
Shannon Cwikla
Shannon is a digital media analyst and artist. She does Photoshop for the blog and is working with your mortician on a children’s book. You may recognize her as the grotesque embalmed corpse from the Ecstasy of Decay No.2.
Darren Blackburn
Darren is a Los Angeles photographer with a focus on the use of older film cameras. He shot the home funeral scene for Fortnight Journal and your mortician for Dark Beauty magazine and The Huffington Post.
Ariel Hart
Ariel is an animator and illustrator in LA. She has a masters in experimental animation from CalArts and is the movin’ picture lady for the Ask a Mortician series.
Jim Doran
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.
Get Involved
If you are interested in contributing to the Order of the Good Death, please email us at orderofthegooddeath@gmail.com