Rachel Palermo is Deputy Director of the Mary Hoch Center for Reconciliation and a PhD student at George Mason University’s Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution. Her emerging research explores community-based healing and transformative reconciliation, particularly in Washington, D.C., and Northern Virginia.

She is interested in how movement, music, collaborative arts, gardening, and other shared practices can support connection and collective action, using participatory research shaped by the people who sustain these community spaces.