Advocacy
In March of 2020, Stephanie was working as Supervisor of Creative Arts Therapies on an Inpatient Psychiatric Unit in the Bronx borough of New York City. Vulnerable to high exposure, she became sick with COVID-19 shortly after the pandemic hit that April, and experienced long-haul COVID early on, as it was only beginning to be understood. After four months of wavering health and alternating remote work accommodations and medical leave, she returned to work in August, only to contract COVID-19 again within three weeks of her return. She became severely ill, with multiple biological systems impacted for the next three years. She required full, long-term disability and family care for over a year, and is still restricted in the types and duration of work and engagement she can participate within. She was not ever able to return to working in the Inpatient Psychiatric Unit she was passionately dedicated to providing services and programming on.
Stephanie now identifies as a disabled woman, with ongoing chronic medical conditions which remain unpredictable and poorly understood—both by the medical profession, but also by the public at large. Despite working in the therapeutic community, Stephanie has experienced first hand the exclusion, othering, and marginalization in response to this level of her intersectional identity which disability and invisible illness garner.
Stephanie has worked for years with the often marginalized communities of persons with long-term, persistent mental illness, as cross-sectioned with other levels of intersectional identity which often limit access and equity—further contributing to the very stressors that trigger episodes of diagnosis. Now, with increased motivation from her own experiences of exclusion and restriction, Stephanie offers her energy and skills in the ongoing mission of achieving education, understanding, and social progress in issues of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion—across identities, locations, and roles.
Please contact In|vision with any project or initiative you have which may benefit from the services listed here. Stephanie is equipped to publicly speak, write, or create community and/or individualized art around these issues. She does not hesitate to educate others on the journey she has had with long-haul COVID in raising awareness and education on the issue, and on the larger issue of disability inclusivity. Nor will she shrink away from using the insights and conceptualizations around it to generalize in small glimpses and speak to the experiences of others whose identities have been discriminated against, oppressed, devalued, under-accessed, damagingly othered, or ignored.