For the past four years, photographer John Eng has documented the evolution of WADE. His photographs capture moments of dedication, exchange, and shared purpose, offering a glimpse into the people and processes behind the work.

From rehearsals and performances to quiet, everyday interactions, Eng’s images trace a collective journey shaped by trust, creativity, and sustained collaboration. Together, the photographs create a visual record of a partnership built over time—capturing not only the labor behind WADE’s work, but also the relationships, energy, and spirit that bring its community to life.

Garden of the Taken is an interactive series of artworks by Giada Matteini confronting the ongoing reality of femicide in the United States and inviting audiences into active witnessing, remembrance, and reflection.

Inspired by global and national data, the series reveals the profound gaps in how femicide is documented, counted, and recognized. Through flowers—symbols of beauty, fragility, mourning, and remembrance—Matteini transforms data into visual landscapes that honor the lives behind the numbers.

Each bloom represents a life. Each arrangement reveals intersecting vulnerabilities shaped by race, age, migration, sexuality, disability, and class. In this way, the flowers become both an artistic medium and a tool of investigation, reminding us that statistics are never abstract: they represent real people, families, bodies, and communities.

While the artworks can be experienced in any order, visitors are invited to move through the series as originally conceived:

From a global lens
140: Memorial in Bloom
Every Ten Minutes

To a national lens
729 (and Counting)

To our communities and family structures
Curtain/Home

Together, these works transform the gallery into a garden of remembrance—a living archive where grief, testimony, and resistance coexist. Visitors are invited to move among these floral constellations, tracing patterns of loss while considering the social structures and systems that make such violence possible.

Garden of the Taken is ultimately both an act of remembrance and a call to action: to honor the lives behind the data, challenge the systems that normalize gender-based violence, and imagine a future where flowers bloom for celebration rather than mourning.

The Way Back is a new dance-theater work in development by WADE that explores silence, grief, ritual, memory, and the possibility of embodied joy. Written and choreographed by Giada Matteini, the work draws from her experience as a survivor of domestic violence and traces a journey from trauma toward healing, resilience, and joy.

Performed by Matteini alongside dancers Alisha Khatwani and Chiara Pretelli, the work creates a dialogue between past and present. The two younger performers embody earlier versions of Matteini, bringing to the stage the vulnerability, strength, and hope that emerge through rebuilding a life after violence. The work also reflects on the complexities of pursuing an artistic life alongside single motherhood.

Developed in partnership with anti-violence organizations including Rompi il Silenzio and La Nara in Italy and the Domestic Violence Project in New York City, The Way Back extends beyond the stage. The project creates opportunities for dialogue, reflection, and connection, centering survivor experiences and fostering spaces for collective healing.

At its heart, The Way Back asks what it means to return to oneself—and to reclaim the body, movement, and joy that violence attempts to take away.

See Me Whole is a short film created by WADE through Body as Witness, a collaborative workshop developed with peer leaders from the Domestic Violence Project.

Rooted in lived experience and survivor leadership, the workshop uses movement, dialogue, and storytelling to explore how experiences of trauma are held, expressed, and remembered in the body—and how creative practice can create space for agency, connection, and self-expression.

Through choreographic exploration, participants reflect on resilience, identity, and voice, transforming experiences that are often kept hidden into opportunities for witnessing, reflection, and reclamation. The process centers each participant’s right to shape how their story and identity are expressed and seen.

At the heart of Body as Witness is the understanding of the body as both an archive of experience and a site of survival. Through movement, participants explore gestures of rupture, connection, strength, and release, reflecting the ongoing process of reclaiming agency and finding new ways to be seen and heard.

The resulting film, See Me Whole, shifts the focus from what happened to survivors to who they are and how they choose to be seen. Through movement and visual storytelling, the film invites audiences to encounter survivors beyond their experiences of violence—to see their identities, resilience, complexity, and the lives they are creating.

See Me Whole is an invitation to witness survivors in their wholeness: not defined by what happened to them, but by who they are, who they are becoming, and the stories they choose to tell.

From Violence to Voice is an immersive exhibition by WADE exploring the experiences, realities, and lasting impact of domestic and gender-based violence. Through visual art, photography, sound, movement, personal stories, and interactive installations, the exhibition creates space for recognition, witnessing, remembrance, and reflection.

The exhibition moves beyond statistics and representations of violence to center the voices, identities, resilience, and agency of those who have experienced it. Visitors are invited to consider how violence operates, what it takes to reclaim one’s voice and sense of self, and how individuals and communities can become part of creating change.

At its heart, From Violence to Voice is an invitation to listen, witness, remember, and imagine what becomes possible when experiences that have been silenced are brought into the light.