Charlene Lam

Charlene Lam is a certified grief coach, TEDx speaker, curator, and the author of Curating Grief: A Creative Guide to Choosing What to Keep After a Loved One Dies. After her mother died suddenly in 2013, Charlene leaned into her creativity and instincts as a curator to guide herself through grief.

With her creative platform The Grief Gallery® Charlene presents exhibitions internationally featuring the belongings of loved ones lost, including installations in Los Angeles, New York City, London, and Lisbon.

She’s shared her life-affirming Curating Grief® approach with thousands of grievers through her individual client work, group programs, events, and talks. Her TEDx talk, “What Grief and Soy Sauce Taught Me About Life After Loss,” selected as a TEDx Editor’s Pick, has been viewed more than 20,000 times.

A proud Chinese-American New Yorker like her mom, she’s based in Lisbon, Portugal.

• Curating Grief® and creative, non-clinical approaches to grief support
• Grief, belongings, and meaningful objects
• Storytelling, narrative and meaning-making after loss for post-traumatic growth
• Grief, identity, culture, and belonging
• Arts-based, design-led, community-based and participatory approaches to grief care
• Grief literacy and changing the culture around grief

Curating Grief: A Creative Guide to Choosing What to Keep After a Loved One Dies

How do we decide what to keep after a loved one dies? This helpful guide from certified grief coach and curator Charlene Lam offers an innovative way of seeing meaningful objects, the physical belongings, and our relationships with the dead, the living, and ourselves.

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Curating Grief® is a creative, object-centered approach developed by grief coach, author, and curator Charlene Lam. Drawing on the practices of curating, it invites people to engage with meaningful objects, stories, and memory to explore the many meanings attached to loss. Rather than treating grief as something to resolve, Curating Grief centers choice, interpretation, and agency — helping people consider what they want to remember, how they want to tell their stories, and what they want to carry forward.

Website (umbrella site for interviews about Curating Grief): www.curatinggrief.com

The Grief Gallery® is an award-winning participatory arts project founded by grief coach, author, and curator Charlene Lam that explores grief through meaningful objects, stories, and shared witnessing. Beginning as a pop-up exhibition in 2015, it has grown into a body of work encompassing installations, gatherings, workshops, and public programs in community, cultural, and healthcare settings. Through objects as carriers of memory, narrative, and emotional resonance, The Grief Gallery creates space for grief to be seen, shared, and understood as both a deeply personal experience and a collective, cultural one.

Exhibitions and activations have been in diverse settings including:

• A community garden in East London during the London Design Festival, engaging with local residents and professional designers alike.

   

• The inaugural Grief Camp at the famous Kripalu yoga retreat in the Berkshires, where phone booths became gallery spaces for participants.

   

• Portugal’s biggest public hospital, with an exhibition in Lisbon co-created by and for healthcare workers, in partnership with the palliative care team.

Website: www.thegriefgallery.com

Curating Grief® is Charlene Lam’s creative approach to engaging with loss through objects, stories, memory, interpretation, and intentional choice. The Grief Gallery® is the public-facing platform where that approach comes to life through participatory installations, gatherings, and shared witnessing. Together, the work moves between private reflection and public engagement, creating opportunities for people to explore their own experiences of loss while contributing to a broader cultural conversation about how grief is expressed, witnessed, and understood.