Supported by a 2025 Luce-AAR Advancing Public Scholarship Grant (Henry Luce Foundation and the American Academy of Religion), Anna Hennessey held three Immersive Art Rebirth Events in San Francisco’s Lower Haight neighborhood over the past month. Events on November 28th and December 28th and titled “Re-Conception Pod Rebirth Experiences” were held at The Radical Reading Room on Haight Street near Fillmore, while a larger event titled the “Rebirth Tunnel Immersive Art Installation” was held at the Harvey Milk Center for the Arts located at 50 Scott Street. All events were free and open to the public.

In all three events, participants began their experiences in Re-Conception Pods. After first processing the self through writing, they then walked into a private space carrying their writing with them. In the Radical Reading Room events, the private space contained a second pod, which they proceeded to while listening to verbal affirmations in the room. After processing what they had written through voice and material destruction of the writing in a Rebirth Box, participants left the room and received Rebirth Certificates. The Harvey Milk Center for the Arts event contained a larger tunnel in the private space. Participants in that event began in one of three pods before entering the sacred space of the tunnel, through which they walked and similarly processed what they’d written in a Rebirth Box. They also received Rebirth Certificates upon exiting.

Some participants experienced these installations emotionally. One woman named Cate described the Re-Conception Pod Rebirth Event at The Radical Reading Room as if she had been in a sacred cave, and there were participants in all three events who released tears during their rebirth processes.

Hennessey has given artist talks on the creative process and history behind her Rebirth Installations at a number of conferences, including Harvard University’s 2025 Spirituality and the Arts Conference, the Society for the Study of Pregnancy and Birth’s 2025 Virtual Symposium, the 2024 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion, and the 2024 Annual Conference of the American Academy of Religion, Western Region.

Different iterations of this same project will be held in San Francisco and elsewhere into the future.