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Kaf Warman, was a teacher, artist, and true visionary who deeply touched the lives of so many students, both within and without the walls of Carnegie Mellon University. She not only taught us how to get in better touch with our physical being, but with our spiritual being as well, creating a space where we were invited to experience the true multitude of our individual and collective selves. To know ourselves as more than just these little egos we’ve built up. To know ourselves as elements, as colors, as sounds, as textures, as the seasons themselves. Even so, she also freed us from the pretense of taking any of it too seriously. She loved to laugh and strongly insisted on humor’s capacity to save; a belief that deeply suffused her ethos in teaching commedia, improv, and clown work. Even towards the end of her life and as her health declined, she had this amazing twinkle in her eye—a joke she seemed to share with the universe. And when that twinkle would blossom into laughter in response to one of our clown numeros, it felt like the whole world was laughing right there with us. 

For those with whom her work resonated, it almost always came with a love for oneself and the rest of the world that is truly incomparable, especially at the ages where we were learning these lessons. A love for the little details, the changes, the cycles, the life that we are so lucky to bear witness to. Kaf left us with a seed of hope. And, although in the frigid winter of the present it can be easy to forget that it’s still there, germinating beneath the soil; even still, it is there. Growing and waiting to sprout and meet the spring.