Who We Are

We are a community of artists whose work is informed by a spiritual lens. This may be engaging directly with religious faith or delving more broadly into essential life questions of meaning, identity, and humanity—themes which, in many ways, underlie all art.

We come from diverse backgrounds, life stages, art disciplines, and spiritual traditions. We are ecumenical in that many of us come from a range of Christian faith traditions. We also welcome those from other faiths, philosophical inclinations, or who may simply be curious.

Many of us live in the metropolitan DC area, but we also have an online presence through our literary and arts journal. We hold both in-person and virtual events, and make our resources available for both personal use and to allow others to gather and create community right where they are. We’d love for artists of faith anywhere to be able to find the connection and community they may be looking for.

What We Do

We connect and uphold artists of faith in the DC area and beyond. We create ways to be together and reasons for us to find each other. This might be through gatherings in the form of salons, workshops, open mic nights, and other events; or collaborative projects, such as our literary and arts journal, podcast, and Advent calendar. We hold smaller gatherings to encourage deeper conversation, and larger gatherings to foster the cross-pollination of ideas and to connect us with the wider communities we’re part of through our places of worship, neighborhoods, and professional lives.

We seek to enliven spiritual conversations through the arts. We believe the creative process is a spiritual journey, that art is prayer and worship, and that both creative and spiritual practices create opportunities to encounter mystery and to deepen our awareness. We seek to invite those who may come from the spiritual end to explore their faith in new ways, and those from the creative end to grapple with the essential questions and universal themes at the core of religious faith. We aim to be accessible to creatives and contemplatives alike, and in so doing, we hope to exist as a community where these two inclinations meet.

Our Story

This creative project began when two friends, visual artist Lisa Shirk and writer Julie Wan, felt a need for deeper community and support for artists of faith. We bonded over our creative process as being not just a way to enhance our faith, but as completely essential to our spiritual lives. And we thought surely there are others in the DC area who feel similarly. So we began to brainstorm ways to find and connect with these kindred spirits.

As we reached out to friends, our own churches, and other churches and groups in town, we started to hear stories of other creative contemplatives who shared this deep need to connect with like-minded folks. Our vision grew into this arts and faith collective – a community that extends beyond the borders of neighborhoods, churches, and artistic disciplines to inspire, collaborate, and support each other.

Our name is inspired by the poetic form, ars poetica, and by the word poetry itself, which derives from the Greek poieó, meaning “to make.” A poet, then, is a “maker of things,” and to live a poetic life is to make meaning and beauty where we are and with what we are given. Our hope is that Vita Poetica can be a community that makes art of life, reflecting the image of our Maker, the source of all life, beauty, and meaning.