I'm a storyteller, celebrant, and creator of meaningful experiences.
Growing up in a small cowboy town in upcountry Maui, “home” was, and continues to be, made up of a diverse array of cultural traditions and pockets of community. I learned early that gathering was one of the ways people made a place feel like home.
Maybe that’s why, looking back, I can see that I’ve spent much of my life creating reasons for people to come together.
In 2008, I created the Delaware River Food and Wine Festival, twelve boutique events over four days celebrating the local culinary gems and experiences in the towns flanking the upper Delaware River.
The following year, I founded the Bacon & Lox Society, a celebration congregation whose members meet throughout the year to create and perpetuate our favorite traditions around a shared table.
Years later, I created Equal Dignity Pop-up Nuptials, offering free civil wedding ceremonies with particular welcome to LGBTQ+ couples. What began as a way to serve couples became a way for an entire community to participate. Venues, planners, photographers, filmmakers, musicians, graphic designers, other officiants, and nearly twenty florists brought what they had to give and created something beautiful together.
I love creating the container. A reason to gather. A place for people to bring what they have to give and experience something meaningful together.
Before becoming a celebrant, I worked in career development at MIT, helping people tell the story of who they were as we created résumés and prepared for interviews. Choosing which details matter, and understanding what they say when you put them together, is storytelling.
Turns out, storytelling was one of my most transferable skills.
I trained at the Celebrant Institute and Foundation and became an ordained minister. Since then, I’ve had the extraordinary privilege of creating and performing more than 1,000 wedding ceremonies.
My family and I are citizens of the Cherokee Nation, and learning about and practicing Native American ritual, symbolism, culture and ceremony has shaped the way I understand what it means to mark the important moments of our lives.
Probably most of all, motherhood has shaped me. Raising my two children, and continuing to know them as they grow into themselves, has taught me so much about being human, loving people through change, and the many roles we hold within a family.
I love finding the meaning in things, and I’ve learned that I don’t usually need to explain what that meaning is. The right story can do that for us.
In 2008 she created the Delaware River Food and Wine Festival, which consisted of 12 boutique events over four days and aimed to celebrate the local culinary gems and experiences in the towns flanking the upper Delaware River region. In 2009, she founded the Bacon & Lox Society an intrafaith celebration congregation. Members meet throughout the year to both create and perpetuate their favorite traditions around a shared table.
And most recently, in 2020, in response to the Covid-19 pandemic and the changes in the Supreme Court, Alisa founded Equal Dignity Pop-up Nuptials, a community effort to provide free civil wedding ceremonies to ALL, especially LGBTQ+ persons.
Growing up in a small cowboy town in upcountry Maui, “home” was and continues to be, made up of a diverse array of cultural traditions and pockets of community. Inspired by the space between what makes each of us unique and also the same.
Alisa is fluent in infusing meaning into the experiences she creates.
Alisa lives in the Pocono Mountains on the edge of a ridge with her family and ‘the little general’, her Jack Russell, Ulysses.
Photographs on this page graciously provided by:
- Cedar Photography
- M2 Photography