Hannah spent her first 25 years in Kentucky: first in Richmond, then Oldham County, always with extended family in the rural eastern part of the state. She pondered death deeply at an early age, then spent her teen years snapping photos of everyone around her. Always interested in stories in the form of writing, music, and photography, she held the wounds of ancestors in her without knowing it and journeyed toward healing. When she was 19 she experienced a medical trauma that shot her on the quick path to intense death anxiety and panic, and spent the next decade trying to fix herself. Along the way, people near to her died and she held anger, curiosity, and grief together.

She studied mathematics, then became interested in the wacky world of church ministry. She landed at Duke Divinity School in 2010, got her Master of Divinity, got married and had two fabulous daughters. She developed her skills as a photographer and a visual artist, attempting part-time work in family photography and calligraphy services while caring for her tiny children. Then she got a bizarre, aggressive-yet-usually-curable stage IV cancer that came from her pregnancy and spent 2020 getting weekly multi-drug chemotherapy infusions. After that, her death anxiety increased…and then it decreased. Her body healed from the cancer and from the chemo, and her spirit was mended too. Drawing near the threshold helped her see that perhaps it was not so very scary after all.

In the years following, there was divorce, time spent teaching math at a Waldorf School, deep consideration about becoming an ordained pastor, and training as an end-of-life doula. Hannah wrote a book sharing stories and resources from her time with cancer (The Platinum in the Poison: Spiritual and Material Resources from a Year of Chemotherapy under the name Hannah Kate Warner). There was another marriage (to Kent), and new work took form.

Hannah believes that stories are powerful healers. It isn’t always about the most “beautiful” photos or poetry, but the creative work that captures the humanity in front of us.

She wants everyone to experience freedom from the fear of death, and is adamant that the more we face it—the more stories we hear from the threshold—the more we will collectively heal our fear of death, which is the root of so many other fears.