Hello, I’m Danielle — a midwife turned arts facilitator, and lifelong collector of stories. I’ve always been drawn to the places where creativity and care overlap, where making something with our hands can help us understand what’s happening in our hearts and in our lives.

For the better part of a decade, I worked as a midwife, a profession that taught me how to listen deeply to women and new parents, and hold space for transformation in all its forms. That experience still shapes everything I do. These days, I work in Patient Experience and Advocacy, helping to ensure that the voices of patients and families are heard and fostering meaningful change within the hospital. 

Alongside that, art has always been my way of making sense of things. I’ve painted, collaged, photographed, and stitched since childhood, exploring whatever materials called to me at the time. I used to think I needed to focus on one medium — now I see that following many threads is actually its own kind of strength. Different art materials reveal different types of wisdom and healing. 

I’ve studied Psychology (undergraduate and master's degrees in Developmental Psychology Across the Lifespan) and Midwifery, and both have further nurtured my compassion for humans of all ages and backgrounds. My need for life-long learning has led me to various professional development courses. Some of which include a stand alone course at Kutenai Art Therapy Institute on the expressive potential of various artistic mediums, an online summer school internship in the Birth RITES project at King’s College London, UK — a program that explored art made in response to fertility, birth, and parenting experiences, and various courses on perinatal mental health, birth trauma, and mindfulness. Those experiences deepened my belief that art and storytelling belong everywhere people are learning to care for one another. 

During my last maternity leave, I began gathering parents of newborns/babies together to make art — not picture-perfect pieces that fit neatly in sketchbooks or step-by-step crafts, but open-ended, process and materials-based, reflective creations. We met in living rooms, art galleries, cafes, and libraries, with cups of tea/coffee nearby. Paint-smeared pages dried beside the babies as they played, napped on our laps, or crawled by our feet. Sometimes people felt ready to explore the art prompts, and other times, they just enjoyed being beside creativity, chatting, and enjoying the company. It felt real, comfortable, and alive, and exactly what mothers/new parents were looking for— and that’s where Paper Moons Art Collective was born.