PLESSIS

HANNA du

Hanna du Plessis

"I'm a lover of life. I rub myself on life like a cat against your leg."

That's how Hanna du Plessis described herself. She died on February 1, 2026 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, surrounded by beloved community. She was 49 years old.

Even while dying, Hanna insisted on her full aliveness. As an artist, she expressed through ink, paint, fabric, dance, improvisation, acting, singing, and storytelling. She described herself as "a survivor, a seeker, an outsider, immigrant, recovering workaholic, perfectionist, control freak, oppressor, white settler." Through her work as facilitator, professor, and writer, she held space for collective reckoning, healing, and world-building.

This was characteristic of Hanna: facing what others turn away from, finding beauty in what breaks us, insisting on stubborn gladness even in the furnace of suffering.

BECOMING A SEEKER

Hanna was born in Bellville, Western Cape, South Africa. She studied interior architecture, working across two continents with built projects, teaching positions, and her own design firm. Eventually she faced a harder question: What if the real work wasn't designing spaces, but transforming the patterns that shape how we see and treat each other?

In 2009, after her marriage ended, she immigrated to the United States, "seeking anything that tasted like truth, healing, and liberation." She became a facilitator, learning to hold space for deep pain to surface and be met with unconditional acceptance. She joined collaborators in "social pattern-shifting"—helping individuals, groups, and organizations work with complexity, oppression, trauma, and the conditions for belonging.

TEACHING TRANSFORMATION

In 2012, Hanna became founding faculty of the MFA in Design for Social Innovation at the School of Visual Arts. For fourteen years, she co-taught the Fundamentals course, guiding over 250 students through questions like: How are the patterns of culture and community entangled with my own habits of being? How do we nurture the conditions for everyone's belonging? How do we face limiting beliefs, fear, and unhealed trauma?

Students consistently describe her teaching as transformative. She created brave space for facing difficulty. She practiced rigorous kindness. She modeled what it looks like to keep showing up with full honesty, courageous invitation, and a generous heart.

Beyond the classroom, Hanna facilitated culture-shifting work, particularly around racial healing and organizational transformation. She specialized in working with white people on questions of racial justice, helping them examine their role in systems of harm without getting stuck in shame or defensiveness.

MAKING AND GRIEVING

Hanna made things. She drew and painted, she danced, improvised, acted, sang in choirs, told stories on stage. Making was how she processed what couldn't be spoken. When she could no longer lift her arms to draw, Hanna painted pictures with words. When she could no longer speak, she used a gaze-tracking device and a synthesized voice.

"Grief is trustworthy," she came to believe, "and we are resilient."

In 2021 she had a miscarriage and wrote through her grief. "Grief has a way of scratching you open," she wrote. "You think you grieve one thing and then realize you are grieving everything." Listening inward and expressing outward—this became the pattern of how Hanna helped people touch the deep stuff we'd rather avoid, but that yearns to change.

STUBBORN GLADNESS

In March of 2023, Hanna was diagnosed with bulbar-onset ALS, the fastest-progressing form. Her neurologist told her she had two to five years to live, probably closer to two.

Hanna's initial question was, "Is life with ALS worth living?" But she found her way to a different question, drawing from Ram Dass: "Healing does not mean going back to the way things were before, but rather allowing what is now to move us closer to God." She said, "What a crushing invitation, to allow the loss of all I love to become an offering to Life itself."

She gathered her people and made a request: "I don't want a circle of care that centers on me. I want to participate in a community of mutual care." Nearly thirty people formed what they called "Careforce," learning to care for Hanna while caring for each other and themselves. They struggled through ever-changing demands, tangled healthcare systems, personal and relational difficulties, and relentless 24/7 attentiveness. They struggled, persisted, and delighted. Hanna described her time in this community as "the most alive I have ever felt."

THE INVITATION

Hanna leaves behind both her beloved birth family and an extensive chosen family. Her parents Elsa and Eben in Pretoria, South Africa; siblings Otto and Lilla; partner Seth Payne and his children Otto and Early; creative partner Marc Rettig; soul-friends Ti Wilhelm and Erika Johnson; and countless students, colleagues, and friends worldwide.

She leaves several books and projects in various stages of completion. These works are in stewardship for future development and publication.

More than her work, Hanna leaves an invitation—to not "look away to be okay." To face limiting beliefs, fears, and unhealed trauma. To practice being together across difference. To be honest about difficulty while trusting that transformation is possible.

She wrote: "Practice noticing when we feign faux acceptance, and instead choose to face the hurt. Practice allowing ourselves all the space to rage and hate, but not get stuck there. Practice holding each other in great care when we feel hopeless and would rather opt out."

Hanna lived what she taught: that we can meet life's blows without closing down, that stubborn gladness is possible even in dying, that a world of belonging is worth working toward even when we won't live to see it bloom.

BURIAL SERVICE

Everyone is invited to a graveside service at Penn Forest Natural Burial Park, 121 Colorado Street, Verona PA 15147, on Wednesday, February 4, at 3:00 pm.

In lieu of flowers, honor Hanna by doing the difficult thing: have the conversation you've been avoiding, embrace your old wounds and serve them tea, engage with the relationship that needs repair. She'll be rooting for you from the other side.

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Arrangements by Natural Funeral Company, 412.545.7500.