Bess Welden is an award-winning playwright, performer, and theater educator based in Waterville, Maine. She spent a year as a National Arts Strategies Creative Community Fellow developing her work at the intersection of art and social change.
As the founder of Death Wings Project, which offers creatively compassionate community art-making and storytelling programs about loss and grief, Bess led a team of over 20 Maine-based artists to bring performances of her play Death Wings to production in 2023.
For the last two years she has co-facilitated the Project’s wing-making workshop for over 100 participants in Maine, New Hampshire, and California, and hopes to co-create this hands-on ritual for remembering and letting go with many more people.