HDS communications reached out to our 2022 graduating students to hear from them in their own words about their experiences at HDS, the people who've helped and inspired them along their grad school journeys, and their plans for the future.
Memorable Moment
Throwing an impromptu Divinity School dance party on the steps of Widener Library the night the 2020 election was called.
Staying after hours in the Harvard Museum of Natural History to tell stories to one another in front of dinosaur bones a few weeks before we were all sent home.
Getting a true taste of the monastic life thanks to a worldwide shutdown.
Seeing you up close, far away, as we learned telepathy together via Zoom.
Delivering my first-place Billings sermon on Virginia Woolf and miraculous music.
Getting some of you out into the ocean and on top of waves with me.
Favorite Class or Professor
God . . . How can I name just one? Everyone writing through crisis with me in "Finding Beauty in a Broken World," taught by Terry Tempest Williams; the ecstatic reading I did in "Religion & Virginia Woolf" and "Teresa of Avila," both taught by Professor Stephanie Paulsell; "The Conduct of Life" lecture led by Professors Cornel West and Roberto Unger; "Quests for Wisdom," another great lecture tag-teamed by Professors Stephanie Paulsell, Davíd Carrasco, Michael Puett, and Arthur Kleinman; making music in quarantine with others in the Songwrighter’s Apothecary Lab led by Professor esperanza spalding; Laurie Anderson’s Norton Lectures; learning how to write a screenplay with Professor Musa Syeed; getting acquainted with the early Christian mystics with Professor Charlie Stang; three years of reading and rereading the Upanisads, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Yoga Sutras with Professor Frank Clooney; accidentally landing myself in Pali and other Buddhist studies classes with Professors Beatrice Chrystall, Janet Gyatso, and HDS’s greatest storyteller, Charles Hallisey.
What I Hope to Be Remembered By
As the founder of the Harvard Divinity Surf Club. As Idgy Dean—the one-woman mystical rock opera and Renaissance Artist reborn after a plague. As a positively inspired, enthusiastic, and hopeful presence in the classrooms. As the person who taught you a way to meditate, move your body, salute the sun, enter the ocean, and listen to music. By my words. By my sermons. By my songs.
Future Plans
I am SUPER EXCITED to be delivering the Graduate English Address at Commencement!! Also, a week before I graduate—and under the Super Full Blood Moon Total Lunar Eclipse—I will be premiering a LIVE multimedia music performance in Harvard Divinity’s historic Williams Chapel. This show will chronicle the saga of surviving the coronavirus crisis via monastic music-making at Harvard University, and is part of my final thesis, ILLUMINATED / MANUSCRIPT: A Chronicle of Lightning Bolts.
In the year to come, I hope to pitch this project for a book, produce it as a music record, and develop it further into a touring show. This summer, however, I mostly just want to rest, surf, practice yoga, and watch a lot of TV. I think I’m moving back to Brooklyn, but God only knows . . .
I would like to host a retreat of some kind in early 2023 and further hone what I can offer as a spiritual teacher. In a few years, my dream is to open up a monastery/mixology bar called Teresa’s. And before I die, I want to “Charlie Chapl(a)in”––make a full-length film or tell-a-vision series that I write, direct, compose the music for and star in.