Hi, I’m Hilarie — an Appalachian artist, art therapist in training, and musician whose work bridges folklore, music, and healing. Rooted in communal storytelling, my work reimagines traditional narratives through a trauma-informed lens, addressing classism, generational poverty, and the rural-urban divide.

My artistic practice centers accessibility, challenging barriers within cultural spaces often marked by elitism, while cultivating artistic experiences that invite belonging and resilience. Through song cycles, collaborative artmaking, and community engagement, I seek to transform inherited stories of loss and survival into spaces of dialogue and possibility, weaving together art, therapy, and music as tools for reclamation and connection.

As a multi-instrumentalist and vocalist, I compose and perform music that reimagines traditional tales for today.

I’m also a teaching artist who loves helping young people find their creative voices. Whether through music lessons, group workshops, or collaborative projects, I aim to build spaces where students feel empowered, confident, and free to express themselves. My approach is trauma-informed and accessibility-driven, always working to bridge the rural-urban divide and dismantle classism in arts spaces that can feel closed-off or elitist.

At the heart of everything I do, whether in performance, teaching, or therapy, I return to art making, story and song as tools for remembering who we are and imagining who we might become. Art is not only a vessel for memory, but also a practice of possibility: a way to gather, to listen, and to create new pathways forward together.

My community work has been mainly forging connections with grassroots initiatives and artistic exploration and connection building. In my artistic life, I combine my interest in body movement, story and folklore with music and theater to explore memory, trauma, and identity as the things we carry and tools for transforming both our rural and urban communities and bridging the gaps between the two. In 2018, Amy Brooks and I co-founded the Cardinal Cross Arts Collective to create a platform to explore these aspects, specifically around Appalachian Identity through music, theater, and mixed media, through this endeavor we were able to create an open forum of conversation between urban and rural artmakers, and though this endeavor has closed, the conversations curated have remained open and a deeply rooted part of my work. I have over 6 years of experience in artistic producing, community organizing, strategic planning, and public programming. I serve on three boards where I provide community consult for strategic planning, programming and artistic management. I have served as an advisor for the Rural Assembly's Rural Women's Summit, as a guest facilitator for the International Storytelling Center- teaching on community and collective identity, and have consulted with various NYC organizations on grant writing. I am a member of the 2025 New York Arts in Education Roundtable Teaching Artist Mentorship program, and a 2025 Petri Project recipient through the team. Learn more about my project, Borrowed Ground, HERE.