My Pen Name Is Eden King.
It’s also a concept — a reminder that our choices matter, and that we alone decide the legacy we leave behind.
I’m a D.C. based artist, filmmaker, restaurant consultant & designer.
I paint. I make films and experiential art. I build companies from vision to execution — the brand, the pro forma, the operational documents and the website that tells the story. I publish books, zines and research.
I believe healing is in the infrastructure & empathy is a system.
The living ecosystems I build help connect the body, culture and collective healing.
I love to dream with fellow dreamers.
I am a multidisciplinary artist, writer, filmmaker, designer and experience-maker working across installation, performance, film, publishing, digital media, objects, clothing, hospitality and participatory spaces.
My work asks what we inherit — and what we are allowed to create, transform, or end.
I am interested in the places where the personal becomes structural: where the body meets culture, memory becomes material, and individual experience reveals the larger systems already in motion around us. My work examines what we inherit — through our bodies, families, institutions, histories and environments — and how those structures might be understood, taken apart, reconstructed, or ended.
Across mediums, I return to transformation rather than perfection: to what has been discarded, misread, wounded, inherited, or worn down, and what it might become when we choose to work with it rather than erase it.
Much of the work is repurposing. I remake objects and clothing rather than starting from nothing, and I work with natural materials wherever I can, because I believe what we put against the body and place in a room should improve the experience of being human while staying true to the particular person living it. Nothing here is meant to flatten anyone into a type.
My practice moves between the domestic and the mythic, the intimate and the systemic: gardens, tables, clothing, ritual, food, water, the body, Medusa, the apple, the sea — alongside healthcare, technology, public institutions and the structures through which we organize collective life. Through film, writing, objects, environments and digital tools, I use these materials and systems to explore inheritance, exile, desire, trauma, repair, feminine power, intimacy, agency and our relationship to one another and the natural world.
I am particularly interested in what happens when human bodies encounter human systems: who those systems protect, what they ask us to accept as inevitable, and what becomes possible when we understand how they were constructed.
At the center of the work is a question of agency. We arrive inside bodies, families, stories, cultures and systems already in motion. Some deserve to be carried forward. Some can be remade. Some need to end.
What did you inherit?
What will you do with this life?
2023–2026
This series is called God’s Armor. It is my story of finding faith — and a shield.
The paintings belong to a longer piece of work: an ongoing full-length documentary about surviving childhood sexual abuse. About finally stopping — no longer rebuilding the cage — and about seeking, and finding, faith in something more.
The inquiry underneath the work — zines, field notes, essays and research in progress. Pieces appear as they are finished.
Unfinished drafts, half-built tools, drawings that did not resolve, and the versions that came before the version you know.
Everything in here carries its real status. Nothing is tidied up on the way in, and nothing has to belong to a category to be let in.
The chest is open. Filling it is the work.
From design to execution I help dreamers in the f+b world define + execute their story worlds. My experience as an operator, bar director, creative director & artist deeply inform my work. I combine these viewpoints to offer a more holistic perspective on developing your food + beverage project. I love co creating experiential + impactful spaces. To be honest, I’m into things I’ve never gotten to create before + I want to work with people who are interested in doing good & making money. I’ve been lucky to work with incredible individuals over the last years + I am proud to showcase the work we have co created together.
I have opened fourteen restaurants. I bridge the gap between operations, finance & creative.
A free gift for the restaurant fam.
A menu is a design object and a business system at the same time. The work sits where those meet — product mix, pricing architecture, placement, structure, sales behaviour, and whether the kitchen can execute it on a Friday.
The psychology, science & strategy behind profitable restaurant menus — a workbook for owners and operators.
33 pages · free, no email required.
Language, tools and programming for empathy-based, trauma-informed systems.
Public empathy means treating care as infrastructure rather than sentiment — something a culture builds on purpose, the way it builds roads.
Paradise Over Power started as research, because I was curious — fighting uphill, trying to be seen, and doing my best to heal inside a system whose governance demands suffering and often blocks healing.
Paradise Over Power
If empathy is a system, somebody has to write down how the existing systems actually work — who pays, what generates revenue, and what that produces in people’s lives.
We are the cattle and the feed. The equations for profit from the Governance series, measured on one body — priced from birth to burial, in hours of work, by who you are and where you live, with the rights that let you stop overpaying.
A report on treatment legitimacy, written as a fact check rather than an argument. The lens: the size of a compound’s evidence base is a function of its business model, not a referendum on its legitimacy.
Integrated edition — the thesis, the ten equations, and the violence behind the diagnosis. It reads the diagnosis of women as mentally ill as an administrative and economic mechanism rather than only a clinical one, prices it out system by system, and connects documented rates of sexual and physical violence to the diagnoses that follow them.
A working draft. Figures awaiting primary-source confirmation are flagged in the text.
Ten American systems that control money, custody, freedom and records, examined through what generates revenue and who pays.
The denial costs the insurer nothing. The appeal costs the patient everything.
Design strategy for businesses making the world better. We work with the dreamers and doers of the small business world — brand, financial model, web and the operations underneath all of it.
Creativity is medicine.
DBA runs its own site, its own enquiries and its own search presence.
Some of the sites I build are for entrepreneurs, some are for businesses, and some are for the people. I believe in using creativity, human intuition and technology to tell our stories and to make the world better. I design and build each one myself, from the concept to the code.
A browser extension. A dot that sweeps the width of any page at a speed you choose, with an optional low tone underneath — the bilateral module from The Thirty-Two Paths, made to work anywhere. A focus and self-regulation aid; not EMDR therapy, and not a substitute for care.
No analytics, no network requests, no account. It stays dormant until you click it, and only on the tab you are looking at.
To install: unzip it, open your browser’s extensions page, turn on developer mode, and choose Load unpacked. Chrome, Edge, Brave and Arc all work the same way. Firefox 128 and newer can load it from about:debugging, though that has not been tested and Firefox drops temporary add-ons when it restarts.
Desktop only. Phones cannot run it — iOS does not allow browser extensions outside the App Store, and Chrome on Android has no extension support at all. The same practice lives inside The Thirty-Two Paths, which works in any phone browser.
if you wanna talk
i’m here.
Based in Washington, D.C. Working anywhere the project is worth it.
I’m opening space for aligned investors, philanthropists and creative partners who believe in:
There is a written brief for all of it — the structure, what already exists, how the commercial arms and the nonprofit are held apart, the risks, and what the capital is for. It is the same document whether you are reading it as an investor or as a funder; the two routes are set out at the end of it.
Read the investor & funding brief →
Wear Your Feelings & Love Each Other
Public Empathy Denim Jacket
Public Empathy Baseball Jersey
Mother Tongue Graphic T-Shirt
Mother Tongue Vintage Art T-Shirt
Not Sorry Vintage Nudes T-Shirt
Not Sorry Organic Rib Baby Tee
EROS Tank
Hooded Sweatshirt
Mother Tongue Sweat Shorts
“Witness Me” Corduroy Cap
Classic Dad Cap
Mother’s Eye Woven Blanket
Not Soy Candle
Mother Tongue Eco Tote
DBA Logo Eco ToteI make wearables by hand — painted, lettered, one at a time. There is a limited run of hats and genderless robe shirts available now.
