What if healing isn’t about moving people through pain faster—but about learning how to stay with what is unfinished, formless, and unresolved?

In the inaugural episode of Dangerous Stories, Chris Hoff sits down with interdisciplinary artist, curator, and cultural architect Dea Jenkins for a wide-ranging conversation on care, liminality, beauty, and collective healing. Drawing from her work at the intersections of art, theology, and social healing, Dea challenges many of the dominant assumptions shaping contemporary mental health culture, from the obsession with productivity and progress to the medicalization of ordinary human threshold experiences.

This conversation explores what it means to design practices for people living inside transition rather than trying to rush them toward resolution. Dea reflects on how art can hold what language cannot, why beauty is not a luxury but a condition for aliveness, and how ritual and communal making offer counter-stories to the trauma-informed industrial complex.

Together, Chris and Dea examine liminal space not as a problem to solve, but as a site of cultural meaning-makinges pecially for bodies and communities who are forced to live in perpetual “in-between” states. From racialized trauma and collective consciousness to making circles and threshold-holding as infrastructure, this episode asks what futures we are quietly defuturing when we refuse to honor liminal time.

Dea's Website: https://ethosofcare.co/

Dangerous Stories Studio: @dangerousstoriesstudio