About Me

I’m Riordan—an artist, independent researcher, ritualist, and PhD candidate exploring the edges of healing, identity, and soul.

I hold a bachelor's degree in anthropology and political science from the University of Washington. I worked for five years as an award-winning journalist, covering food systems, craft beer, and farm-to-table culture. These were places where I found meaning and community during the first major collapse of my life: leaving an abusive marriage and beginning to reclaim my queer and trans identity after years of religious repression.

My professional work mirrored my personal initiation. As I remembered who I was, my writing and research turned toward consciousness, healing, psychedelics, myth, grief, and the return to an ensouled world. I came through suicidality to something far more sacred than survival: I fell in love with the world again, rediscovered magic, and once again saw every living thing and sentient, imbued with soul. I began the long process of coming home to my body and myself for perhaps the first time, finding a tenderness I never thought possible. Life was re-enchanted and meaning restored, everything I once sought in religion and never found—and I emerged with a passion for helping others find the same.

Since then, I’ve worked as a gonzo anthropologist, independent ethnographer, and ceremonial participant-observer—researching from the inside out. That path has now formalized into a PhD at the Transart Institute for Creative Research, where I’m building a project that weaves together art, mysticism, plant medicine, and Indigenous cosmologies. I study how humans have always used ceremony to reconnect with what matters—and how we can remember those ways in a modern context, especially for queer, trans, and neurodivergent people.

My work draws on:

  • Jungian and archetypal psychology

  • Mystic and contemplative traditions (Buddhist, Hindu, animist)

  • Maya calendar systems (trained by a lineage holder)

  • Plant spirit healing and the Shipibo system

  • Internal Family Systems, EMDR, and Compassionate Inquiry

  • Direct experience, ritual design, and ancestral dreaming

Based on my lived experience, creative research, practice and training in healing modalities, and time and service spent with elders, knowledge-keepers, teachers, practitioners, and lineage-holders, I am now putting my experience into offerings of love and service. I am beginning to offer 1:1 sessions, group workshops, seasonal ritual containers, and immersive art/performance experiences. I see each as an invitation to return to the sacred—in body, community, ceremony, space, and the time outside of time.

Let’s fall in love again.