WOMB | Johanna Glaser

“I made this collage as a gift for a pregnant friend using a mixture of acrylic paints, linocut prints, tissue paper and pens. It is inspired by and directly draws upon elements from a portrait of a young dead woman by Egon Schiele. At the time, I was in the middle of a palliative care fellowship and personally recovering from a severe IBD flare. It is a meditation on birth, illness, joy, pain and death; an expression of awe as to how humans can simultaneously be wounded, age, heal, celebrate and create throughout the seasons of our lives.”

Johanna (Hana) Glaser is a palliative care physician. She studied philosophy at Pomona College, moved to Ghana to help establish a women’s leadership development nonprofit, and worked as a family planning assistant at Planned Parenthood in Oregon. Glaser also took time off during medical school at UCSF to conduct research about end-of-life care for underserved women in the Bay Area and to complete an introductory training in Buddhist chaplaincy. She went on to complete internal medicine residency at UCSF and hospice and palliative medicine fellowship at Stanford. Outside of medicine she loves quality time with friends and family, screen-free days with a paintbrush, long hikes near cold alpine lakes and her two wily kittens.