Tembi Locke is a New York Times bestselling author, screenwriter, TV producer, podcast host, and speaker known for her powerful storytelling on love, loss, and resilience. She is the co-creator and executive producer of From Scratch, the Netflix hit based on her memoir, which garnered six NAACP Image Award nominations and global acclaim. Tembi’s memoir, From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home, was a Reese’s Book Club pick and a finalist for the Audie Awards and Goodreads Best Books. As a writer and producer, Tembi and her sister, Attica Locke, have an overall deal with Universal Television. This partnership includes projects like co-writing and executive producing the adaptation of Attica’s Edgar Award-winning Highway 59 trilogy, as well as developing new character-driven stories for film and television.

A nationally recognized speaker, Tembi has delivered keynotes on resilience, loss, and motherhood, including her popular TEDx talk, What Forty Steps Taught Me About Love and Grief. Her podcast, Lifted, highlights the inspiring stories of women who have embraced life’s pivots and lifted their lives. With a deep commitment to creativity and advocacy, Tembi’s work continues to inspire others to embrace resilience, community, and the transformative power of storytelling. She lives in Los Angeles and Sicily.

J.J. Duncan is an award-winning television producer, writer, advocate, and co-founder of the nonprofit, “Not Today Cancer,” which raises funds for childhood cancer research. She is widely known in the entertainment industry as an Executive Producer and Showrunner of such hits as Project Runway, and The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning, among others.

After losing her eleven-year-old son to leukemia, J.J. began using her influence as a top television producer to open up discussions of grief, mental health, and end-of-life care through story-telling. J.J. was a speaker at the EndWell conference in November of 2023, and shared about healing through personal storytelling.

She has partnered with Hollywood, Health, & Society at the Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California, in discussing and studying the effects of media’s responsibility for telling authentic stories involving death and dying. She has written for Variety Magazine for World Mental Health Day, disclosing her own healing journey through grief by way of storytelling on television. J.J. has visited Washington D.C. on multiple occasions, to advocate for laws affecting cancer patients, young and old.

She has multiple projects in the works to continue the conversation not only for parents who have lost children, but for anyone looking to explore their own stories of loss.

With all her focus on death, dying, and grief, it may be surprising to learn that J.J. risks delight at every turn, always looking for the funny and striving to take the story to an unexpected place of joy. 

After a happy 30-year career as a palliative physician in the UK, Kathryn took early retirement in 2015 to figure out how to ‘do something’ about the widespread and woeful public misunderstanding of dying she encountered daily in her work. She wondered how we might recapture public understanding by using stories. Fortunately, an unanticipated invitation to describe ‘ordinary dying’ on national radio led to a huge and positive audience response, resulting in opportunities for more media work, an approach by a literary agent who brokered a book deal… and her book of stories about the lives of her patients With The End In Mind became an international best-seller, now translated into 18 languages. 

It’s all been a little bit unexpected. With a second best-selling book (Listen – how to find the words for tender conversations) under her belt and a third book on its way, Kathryn has been invited to speak at conferences, on radio and TV, and at ideas festivals across the UK and around the world. She’s on a mission to change the public conversation about dying, and her method is an age-old device for passing wisdom between generations: storytelling.

Kathryn is delighted to be invited to End Well 2025, to gather with fellow storytellers and celebrate our shared determination to re-claim dying as an important phase in all our lives.

(Photo by Darren Irwin)

John Onwuchekwa is an Atlanta-based storyteller, author, entrepreneur, and speaker. He holds a Doctorate from Emory University with a focus on grief, storytelling, and cultivating virtues. As the Founder of ventures like We Go On Tour and Portrait Coffee, John has been instrumental in endeavors that establish new narratives, particularly for Black and Brown communities. Tying all these plot lines together is John’s desire to see both individuals and communities thrive. His deep and abiding belief is that tragedy doesn’t ruin anyone, hopelessness does. He desperately wants to help people hold on to hope, however they can.

John is the curator of the We Go On Tour, an immersive experience designed to help people experience the serenity that comes from living at the intersection of grief and hope. The tour is an extension of his most recent book We Go On: Finding Life’s Purpose in Life’s Sorrows and Joys. John is married to Shawndra and is the proud dad of Ava.

Shoshana Ungerleider, MD is an internal medicine physician, the host of the TED Health Podcast and leading voice in healthcare who regularly appears as a medical expert voice on CNN, MSNBC and CBS News. She has been involved with 2 Academy Award-nominated Netflix documentaries on end of life. During her training and early years practicing medicine, she often found herself caring for frail, often older patients who were alone, suffering in pain and surrounded by strangers in a hospital setting. Shoshana knew there had to be a better way, a way to make the end of life more dignified and human-centered so that ending well became a measure of living well. She founded End Well in 2017 to do just that.

Rebecca Feinglos is a founder, philanthropist, podcast host, and former policy advisor. Rebecca founded Grieve Leave in 2021 as a way to document her experience on a year-long grief sabbatical — she lost her mother in her teens, her father suddenly in 2020, and her marriage in a drawn-out divorce. Grieve Leave has grown into a global community reaching millions that provides tangible takeaways, resources, and a healthy dose of humor, creating an entire movement around taking intentional time to grieve. Through her podcast “Grief’d Up,” Rebecca brings raw, honest conversations about loss into the open, featuring experts and storytellers who help make grief feel a little less lonely. 

Rebecca has been featured in LA Times, Fortune, TIME, HuffPost, Slate, ELLE, and more for her raw and revolutionary voice, inspiring a more grief-informed world. 

Before becoming a go-to resource on grieving, Rebecca’s career started as a bilingual Spanish/English public school educator, and grew into government: She served in the Chicago Mayor’s Office, and was a senior advisor in the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services. Rebecca was instrumental in spearheading the effort to secure bereavement leave for state employees in North Carolina, and she continues to work with state lawmakers to expand bereavement leave to public school teachers. 

Rebecca is a magna cum laude graduate of Duke University, and earned her Master’s Degree in Public Policy at the University of Chicago. Rebecca is originally from Durham, North Carolina, and now splits her time between Durham and Montreal, alongside her two dogs, Daisy Duke and Ralphie.

Joél Simone Maldonado, affectionately known as The Grave Woman, brings over a decade of groundbreaking expertise and innovation to the fields of end-of-life, death and grief care. As a sacred grief care practitioner, licensed funeral director and embalmer, award-winning educator and speaker, Joél is dedicated to empowering professionals, organizations and governmental agencies to create and implement culturally sensitive protocols and inclusive practices that honor diverse cultures and traditions.

She is the founder of The Multicultural Death & Grief Care Academy where she offers expert insights into cultural competency and dignified end of life, death and grief care for communities of color empowering organizations to navigate the complexities of serving diverse families, staff and communities with authenticity and respect.

Joe’l is also the host of The Death & Grief Talk Podcast and The Grave Woman YouTube Channel provide a safe space to explore the complex emotions surrounding loss and grief. Highlighting compassionate experts, each episode offers insightful conversations, expert advice, and real-life stories to help individuals navigate the often-overwhelming journey of grief. Her signature slogan is that “culture is the medicine for grief”.

Dr. Sasha Hamdani is a board-certified psychiatrist and ADHD clinical expert. She is an author, entrepreneur, and mental health advocate. Dr. Hamdani has worked closely with the White House and Surgeon General’s team to speak out about mental health awareness and was recognized by Harvard as a public health leader. She also has a robust social media following on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube (@thepsychdoctormd) where she provides evidence-backed information and dispels stigma around all facets of wellness. Her book Self-Care for People with ADHD was released through Simon and Schuster in 2023 and her comprehensive ADHD management app FocusGenie launched in Fall of 2023.

Teun Toebes (26) is an international healthcare innovator and humanitarian activist whose mission is to improve the quality of life of people with dementia worldwide. For over 3.5 years, he has been living on the closed ward of a nursing home. He has experienced why looking differently at dementia is so badly needed, which is why Teun decided to take his mission to the next level by looking beyond Dutch borders.

To find answers about how we can make the future more beautiful and inclusive, he travelled the world together with filmmaker Jonathan de Jong over the past few years for the global documentary ‘Human Forever’ to see what we can learn from other countries. The film premiered at a G20 summit on dementia, was awarded with a Golden Calf and is now being screened in 22 countries.

Teun Toebes has more than 200 thousand followers on social media and can be seen in the international media. He’s an international speaker and previously published the #1 international bestseller ‘The Housemates’.

Dr. Adjoa Boateng Evans is an intensive care physician, anesthesiologist, mother, and sought-after speaker who is dedicated to restoring humanism in healthcare. She earned her undergraduate degree in the History of Science and Medicine from Yale University and later returned to Yale New Haven Hospital to complete her residency in anesthesiology. She went on to pursue fellowship training in critical care medicine at the Stanford School of Medicine.

Following her fellowship, Dr. Boateng Evans joined the faculty at Stanford, where she worked in both the intensive care units and operating rooms. She also served as a course director for Reflections and Contextual Medicine, a humanities course for medical students. In addition, she facilitated writing workshops for students and clinicians, using prose and poetry to shed light on the human experience we navigate in medicine.

In 2023, Dr. Boateng Evans returned to the East Coast to join the faculty at Duke University School of Medicine. She continues her clinical work as a critical care physician and anesthesiologist while also serving as a faculty associate with Duke’s Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities & History of Medicine while also teaching in the School of Medicine.

Overall, her work in critical care medicine has facilitated a deep understanding of the vulnerability inherent at the end of life. She uses this lens to explore notions around how we live and die. Her medical humanities work centers around the “Prophesy of Pain,” as she seeks to reconcile moments of joy and suffering novel to the human condition experienced by patients and providers.

Watch her TED Talk here.

Tamatha Thomas-Haase, MPA, was wife to a remarkable partner; mom to a quixotic creative; and a fierce public health practitioner, living with metastatic breast cancer. She knew the comfort provided to others by a warm, homemade meal, a note scribbled on a card or a sit on the front porch. She was told on more than one occasion that her emotions were too big and thus, she was unsupervisable. 

In that legacy snapshot, can you feel how Tamatha lived? 

Here’s the thing: Tamatha is still (very much) alive, joining End Well 2025 from within her radical mission to be remembered for the whole damn thing: her pretty parts and her ugly bits, so that her legacy is really hers. 

Professionally, Tamatha brings 30 years of public health experience facilitating communities of practice; writing tools & curricula; and leading meetings & conferences for state and federal agencies, as well as national nonprofits.

Tamatha roots her work in connection—linking people to each other and to knowledge, in service of collective wellbeing. She also brings this spirit to Grand Exit, the life-affirming death wellness podcast she co-hosts with dear friend Chelsea Leader Gold, sharing the scenic route through the life-death-legacy continuum from ever-shifting vantage points.

Seven years after being diagnosed with Stage III-C triple negative inflammatory breast cancer, Tamatha is living, now metastatically, in a beautiful pile of juxtapositions. (Maybe so are you and yours?). She is thrilled – and humbled – to share musings at End Well.

And you should know: she is still unsupervisable.

Michael Erard is a linguist and non-fiction writer. He is the author of three books about language, the most recent of which is Bye Bye I Love You: The Story of Our First and Last Words, which The Economist called “beautiful” and “strangely comforting.” Other writing has appeared in the New York Times, Science, The Atlantic, Aeon, Texas Observer, and elsewhere. He graduated from Williams College and has an MA and PhD from the University of Texas at Austin. His work has been recognised with awards and fellowships from the Texas Institute of Letters, the Linguistics Society of America, the Max Planck Society, and the US National Endowment for the Humanities. Originally from the US, he now makes his home in the Netherlands, where he is a researcher at the Centre for Language Studies at Radboud University. He is also training to become an end of life doula. 

Cultural Anthropologist, Death Educator, Author

Anita Hannig is a cultural anthropologist, death educator, and author of The Day I Die: The Untold Story of Assisted Dying in America. A finalist for the Oregon Book Awards, The Day I Die combines vividly intimate narratives of individuals pursuing a medically assisted death with hard-hitting reporting on the roadblocks many terminally ill people face in their quest for a self-determined end. In recent years, Anita has emerged as a leading voice on death literacy in America, speaking about her work in hospitals, medical schools, and community spaces across the country. She has written for PBS, Newsweek, the British Medical Journal, Cognoscenti, The Conversation, Undark, and The Seattle Times, among others. In 2024, she came out with a new death education tool, My Death Diary: A Guided Journal for Mortals. 

Anita earned her B.A. in Anthropology from Reed College and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago. She has received an array of fellowships and grants, including from the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the Mellon Foundation. Her first book, Beyond Surgery: Injury, Healing, and Religion at an Ethiopian Hospital (2017), won the Eileen Basker Memorial Prize from the Society for Medical Anthropology in 2018. Anita previously worked as Associate Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University, where she taught classes on medicine, religion, and death and dying.

Filmmaker, Death Doula, Co-Founder 

Heather Hogan is a New York-based filmmaker and death doula whose personal experiences with loss led to a holistic study of life and death. She is the director of the feature documentary, Other Side (2025), which follows activist Lynda Bluestein’s journey, an attempt to access Medical Aid in Dying in Vermont as a non-resident. The documentary premiered at the SXSW film festival in Austin earlier this year. Her films and counseling services investigate the social, emotional, and spiritual impacts of living and dying within a death-denying culture, and highlights where we all have agency to create meaningful change for ourselves and others. She believes that the more curious we are, and the more we collectively think about, talk about, and embrace our mortality, the less we have to fear.

As a student of social work, Heather centers the exploration of mortality and end-of-life care as a form of social activism. She is the co-founder of Death Differently, a short-film series and educational platform focused on unusual stories related to death and dying. She established her coaching practice, Wisdom and Sage in 2016, where her coaching and counseling services blend traditional and nontraditional practices to aid clients in accessing higher levels of fulfillment and connectedness. Hogan’s doula work is often done remotely, and primarily supports and guides family members in how to care for their loved ones at the end of their lives. Her future clinical practice will incorporate the therapeutic use of psychedelics in the treatment of trauma and grief.

Filmmaker, Co-Founder

Carter Oakley is an award-winning filmmaker, co-founder of the online educational platform Death Differently, creative director of Entertainment to Affect Change, and he runs the production company Redins. Carter’s work has predominately focused on terminal illness and end-of-life advocacy.

Jacob Shannon is the son of Lynda Shannon Bluestein, who was a pioneering advocate for medical aid in dying before making that choice for herself in 2024. Picking up where his mother left off Jacob has put himself out front in this cause in his home state of ColoRADo, and elsewhere, regularly speaking to the media, testifying before state legislatures, and volunteers time helping terminally ill patients fulfill the needed paperwork to qualify for medical aid in dying. Jacob lives in Denver with his dog Kiwi and twin daughters and recently has jumped feet first into the nonprofit he started with his mom, Lynda’s Phones, promoting good grief through wind phones.