Hi, I’m Robin
I’m a creative integrator, the connective tissue between vision and execution. Facilitator, collaborative designer, producer, and senior operational lead are some of the roles I've held. Strip away the title, the industry, the deliverable,
what I actually do is tend to transformation: the charged, tender moments when something real is trying to come into being.
How it's held makes all the difference.
A play. A film. A strategy. A studio. A system. A festival. A workshop. A ritual.
Whatever the form, I'm most alive when supporting people to offer their gifts to the world. I'm a skilled and dedicated systems reader and systems designer, with a gift for seeing the whole and the smallest moving part at the same time.
For over two decades I've played key roles on teams and in one-on-one collaboration: supporting the design of a thing, stewarding its creation, holding the moving parts, getting it across the line or presenting it to an audience.
My practice is informed by design thinking, emergent strategy, somatics, attachment and nervous system science, the wisdom and architecture of ritual, and deep nature connection. My approach is grounded in inquiry, iteration, care, and play.
I'm also a woman who loves fiercely and protects what I love. I'm building the liberatory matriarchal future I want my nieces, nephews and nibblings to inherit.
I spend my days tending to what matters to me, and doing my best to interrupt what creates harm (internally and externally): capitalist, imperialist, white supremacist patriarchy. I orient to what already exists and supports me, what is generative, welcoming a world where myriad voices and ways weave what comes next.
I revel in the arts and improvisation, in wild swimming and forest sitting, laughing loudly and crying freely with my people, singing my love to the mystery, and being awestruck by the beauty and synchronicities of life.
If you're thinking about working with me, here's a little more about who you'd be working with.
Curious Cross-Pollinator
My path has never been a straight line, I've come to see my journey through many industries, my ability to be multi-faceted as my one of my greatest strengths. I learn from everything, and I carry what I learn across the thresholds into the next environments and projects.
I've used theatre principles to produce the story cut-scenes for a video game. I've applied communication methods honed on film sets while consulting at an Indigenous planning firm. I've pulled on event production frameworks while project managing the renovation of a visual effects studio. And Deep nature connection and soul work have informed how I supported a community seasonal festival.
This is how I live: I offer myself to process and emergence time and time again.
This means a practice or methodology can be inspired by, but not tethered to a particular discipline, moving freely across fields.
I evolve, as a person, an artist, and a community member, with every new encounter, every framework, surprise and edge I meet. I'm always landing, refining, re-defining, and adding to the elements, skills, practices and lifeways I draw from in any given context.
Whatever you bring me, you get this multiplicity - over two decades of cross-pollinating, a broad range of experience across disciplines.
Plus my genuine curiosity and delight in discovering what your project is reaching toward and how I can be of service.
Forged by Fire
I've burned out twice. Both times because I abandoned myself in service of something else: A boss, a project, a moment of praise. Rebuilding from burn-out, twice, taught me what no training could. I can sense and see where the cracks form, I might lose myself, push too hard and when a mismatch comes at too high of a risk.
I now work from a solid centre, honest about what I care about, what I have to offer, where I want to stretch, and where my limits are.
I’ve found that working this way - openly and honestly - serves everyone: myself, my collaborators, those we serve, and that which is being created.
I live with ADHD (Attention Dialed to a High Dimension) and like many other women at mid-life, I learned about my neurodiversity only recently. I’ve become attuned to and familiar with neurodivergent modes of working, masking and expressing. And I embrace the opportunity to stretch and wiggle my way out of conformity. Just like nature, humans are diverse and spectacular. I seek to collaborate with people who have different minds, bodies, skills, approaches and epistemologies.
I’ll bring my whole self and I’ll respect the wild, true and once outcast parts you bring.
How we work and experiment matters as much as what we produce. Treating ourselves and each other well isn't a nice extra. To me, it's at the heart of the work. Let’s burn down the oppressive systems, but not each other.
Reading Webs & Waves
In any context, be it a team, a project, a stage, a gathering, I'm 'reading' many things at once. I can be perceiving from up in the clouds surveying the whole landscape and down in the grains of sand, attending to details, at the same time.
I track the strategy, the goal, the moving parts and timelines. I follow the quieter things underneath: what's happening between people, what isn't being said, where the relationships are strong and where they're frayed. What wants to move, what wants to be fed, composted, released.
This double-vision is my work.
It's how I sense when a plan is sound but the people aren't ready, or when the item on the agenda isn't the thing that would offer movement.
I'm rarely the subject matter expert, and I don't need to be. My role is to shape the container and hold the process. By asking questions, I seek to co-create the conditions where honest things can be said and generative work can unfold with a little more ease.
When I'm trusted to embody these abilities - strategic and precise, intuitive and attuned - I'm can best serve the project, people and process.
Wild & Untethered
The thing people tell me most often about working with me is that they felt seen, lit up and carried forward in ways they didn't expect. When I collaborate, I pay attention to the whole person, not just the role they play or the task in front of them, but their real motivation and desire.
For some, I feel like the cheerleader they want in their corner. For others, I'm like a spark to re-ignite passion for their work.
I'm inspired and delighted by people creating work that moves our world forward, and leading something that matters to them.
I meet people where they are, not where they should be. I notice what's alive in someone: the gift they haven't named yet, the thing they're protecting, the place they're ready to move.
And I find real delight in the moment something clicks: when an offering finds its shape, a facilitator finds their voice, and the work runs free to become something the world gets to receive. Because we need more goodness, more passion projects, more real and vulnerable work out there.
The One Who Holds Us All
I was born and raised in Tkaronto, the traditional homeland of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishinaabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Huron-Wendat peoples, and now home to many diverse First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples. The place now colonially known as Toronto is covered by Treaty 13 and the now-broken "Dish With One Spoon" wampum belt inter-nation peace agreement.
When I lived there, I did not know any of these names, nor the beautiful and brutal stories that sit within them. My family, community and teachers never taught me about any of this in the 80’s and 90’s. This history came into my awareness after I had moved away from home to go to University at 18. I can’t change that now. But I can connect to what I did know then, and still know now: that the smell of Cottonwood Trees is one of my core memories. As I walked to school along St. Clair, over the reservoir bridge, that sweet perfume would float up and dance around me. I felt at home in a scent. I know that lying exhausted and wet from swimming, on an ancient rock at the edge of a northern Ontario lake, glistening in the summer sun, is one of the best feelings in the world. I know that solo-ing a cedar canoe at dawn, quietly cutting a j-stoke while a Loon call echoes off Birch and into my soul is what I hope to do as I cross over to the other side.
The lands and beings of place live in me.
I was drawn west at 18, wanting to see what it felt like to ski on big Mountains and sit beside a never still Ocean. To play in theatre with other weirdos, and to see who I was away from those who knew me up until then. Subconsciously, I was seeking deep connection to Spirit, and mentorship into wider and older ways of being with Life and Self.
Now, I live as a settler and uninvited guest on the stolen, traditional, living lands of the lək̓ʷəŋən speaking people, known today as the Songhees and Xʷsepsəm (Esquimalt or Kosapsum) First Nations.
I hold immense privilege as a white, cis, english speaking woman from an upper-middle class background, in a mostly able body. With it I will continue to learn and un-learn, grow and take accountability when and where possible, imperfectly.
I ask what it means to hold these identities while showing up in right relationship with the Lands, Airways, Species and Waterways (LAWS) and the People who hold them.
We all share one Mother Earth. From her, we all eat from the same dish. May we share the one spoon with love.