Epiphania Sacred Arts
is a habitat for life-giving
& life-sustaining arts & practices.
Please visit our site often for updated digital reflections, art galleries, offerings, & events, such as open art studios, retreats, workshops, presentations, & other offerings.
About Epiphania
“Our altar, the world.
Our canvas, the universe.”
~ Carrie Rehak
In 1990, Carrie wrote a pithy artist statement that still holds true today: “My paintings are my prayers.” Even works that depict seemingly “secular” subjects - seas, skies, light, shadow - are, to her, sacred.
In 2000, she opened Epiphania, a sacred arts studio and gathering space for making, teaching, and spiritual exploration. In 2010, she relocated her studio to Crockett, an unincorporated town, where the Carquinez Strait meets the San Pablo Bay.
The transformation of the space, from storage room to sanctuary, was both literal and metaphorical. Inspired by wayside shrines and santuarios, the studio was designed to be ever-evolving. However, in 2020, Carrie made the painful yet clear decision to close the brick-and-mortar studio.
Where is Epiphania now? To quote Kit White in 101 Things to Learn in Art School: “The studio is more than a place to work: it is a state of mind.”
Soul Grove Sanctuary and &&& are outgrowths of Epiphania, emerging from day-to-day personal and communal practice. They are shaped by both proximate and distant influences - sacred and secular, ancient and future-oriented - from restorative practices and performance art to permaculture and new cosmology.
Although reflective of Carrie’s rootedness in the Catholic tradition - or, more accurately, in Catholicity (à la Ilia Delio) - this work is primarily the fruit of friendships: with pilgrims, seekers, imagineers, innovators, changemakers, and communion with the living world:
Over time, I came to see that the work I was drawn to - teaching, creating, accompanying - was not separate from my own encounters with suffering, beauty, injustice, and a search for meaning.
Epiphania grew out of these lived experiences, and from a deepening awareness that healing and transformation are never solitary, but unfold in relationship - with others, with the Earth, and with the sacred.
It is in hope - what French philosopher Gabriel Marcel describes as the "memory of the future" - that Epiphania offers these digital and in-person sacred offerings - reflections and practices - that we may be more just, more merciful, more inclusive, more connected, more vibrant, more engaged, more loving, more whole - that is, more fully alive.
About Carrie Rehak
Carrie realizes her creative, intellectual, and spiritual aspirations through an interweaving of practices and media, including ecospirituality, permaculture, cosmology, restorative justice, nonviolence, theopoetics, and the arts.
In 2013, she attended a life-changing training with Joanna Macy, Anne Symens-Bucher, and other community members at Canticle Farm in Oakland, California, and has since become a certified Work that Reconnects practitioner and facilitator. Carrie continues to be nourished by Nonviolent Communication (NVC), which she began studying and practicing that same year.
Her approach - what she finds most enlivening, transformative, and authentic - is "art for life's sake": ethical aesthetics, theopoetics, and art/life, thanks in large part to the influence of such luminaries as Deborah J. Haynes, Linda Mary Montano, Maren Hassinger, and other contemporary visionaries who seek “to dissolve the boundaries between art and life" (Montano), sacred and secular, personal and political, process and product, and ritual and performance.
Carrie holds both an M.A. and Ph.D. in Theology, with a concentration in the arts, from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. She has held positions in nonprofit leadership and as an instructor and director of programs in educational settings, contexts that continually ground her ideas in real-world engagement.
Her work is guided by an ongoing inquiry into meaning: what is the relationship between our experience and our reflection on - and expression of - that experience? And how does this relationship shape personal, social, and ecological responsibility?
Above all, Carrie is committed to formal and informal communities of makers, seekers, and learners as creative agents of transformation, liberation, and flourishing.
Background & Credentials
Academic Foundations
Ph.D. and M.A. in Theology
Graduate Theological Union, BerkeleyB.F.A. in Fine Arts
Academy of Art, San Francisco
Certifications
Restorative Justice
Simon Fraser UniversityWork that Reconnects Facilitator
Permaculture Design - in progress
Certified Life Coach (CLC, PNLP/MNLP, CHP, ICF Credential) — in progress
Hypnosis
Fundamentals of Advanced Ericksonian Hypnotherapy, Mental Research Institute, and additional trainings with Eric Greenleaf, Ph.D., and others; Certified Hypnosis Practitioner - in progress
Spiritual & Somatic Modalities
Spiritual Direction / Retreat Design & Facilitation
More than twenty years experience in individual and group settings, including university and residential renewal programs, e.g., School of Applied Theology / Graduation Theological Union (SAT-GTU) and the Jesuit Renewal Program / Jesuit School of Theology-Santa Clara University (JST-SCU)
Key Influences & Ongoing Practices
The Work That Reconnects
Training with Joanna Macy and Terry and Anne Symens Bucher, et al, grounded in deep ecology, systems thinking and being, engaged spirituality, and collective action.Cosmology
Cosmological and evolutionary spirituality, inspired by Teilhard de Chardin, Brian Swimme, and Ilea Delia.
Nonviolent Communication (NVC)
Training and active practice in empathic, needs-based communication.Permaculture Design & Ecospirituality
Honoring Earth Care, People Care, and Fair Share; integrating regenerative design with spiritual practice.
Decolonization and Anti-Racist Praxis
Informed by ongoing learning in trauma healing, decolonization, racial justice, and ancestral repair. Rooted in the belief that healing is relational and liberation is collective.
Trauma-Informed Recovery
Inspired by principles grounded in Twelve-Step traditions and attuned to the complexities of generational and social trauma.
Art/Life, Theopoetics & Ethical Aesthetics
Inspired by the vision of luminaries, such as Linda Mary Montano, Marina Abramovic, Cecilia Vicuña, bell hooks, and Deborah J. Haynes, who blur the boundaries between sacred and the secular, personal and the social, and ethical and the aesthetic.
Sekected Exhibits, Workshops, Retreats, & Publications
“Gifts of the Holy Outlaws.” Poem with accompanying painting, Evolution Revolution. Deep Times: A Journal of the Work That Reconnects. Forthcoming, March 2026.
“Los vivos entre los muertos.” The Art of Death. Group exhibition, Vacaville Museum, Vacaville, CA. June–November 2025.
“‘Mother, Mother …’: Contemplating Wounds with Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, Fifty Years Later.” Theology and Protest Music, Lexington Books, 2023, pp. 235–262.
“Restorative Practices for Ministries, for Life,” Jesuit School of Theology of Santa Clara University and St. Joan of Arc Parish, San Ramon, CA.
“Advent In/Action: Work, Sabbath, and Ecological Renewal,” Newman Hall–Holy Spirit Parish, Berkeley, CA.
“Hearing the Cry of the Earth and the Cry of the Poor,” Incarnation Monastery, Berkeley, CA.
“To Set the Prisoners Free: How Our Church Can Respond to the Impacts of Incarceration,” with Cat Willett, Catholic Charities East Bay / Diocese of Oakland. CA.
“Where Two or Three Are Gathered: The Catholic Call to Restorative Practices,” with Cat Willett, Catholic Charities East Bay / Diocese of Oakland. CA.
“Sent: Anointing Wo/men, Anointing Earth,” St. Anselm Catholic Church, San Anselmo CA.
Keynote: “Through You I Am Entered,” Commissioning Day for Pastoral Ministry Leaders, Diocese of San Jose, CA.