About Rami
Rami Schwartzer is an American-Israeli spiritual leader, educator, artist, and facilitator with over 15 years of experience fostering healing, connection, and transformation in communities around the world. His work blends spiritual depth and creative expression with insight into interpersonal dynamics, trauma care, and organizational leadership.
As Founding Director of the Den Collective and Ramah Day Camp in Washington, DC, Rami reimagines what community can be. The spaces he facilitates center self-expression, connection, spiritual growth, and authentic connection, pushing beyond the status quo into new relational paradigms. An ordained rabbi, Rami’s identity resists simple labels. His work is neither religious nor secular, but fluid and expansive, a constant exploration of the sacred.
Trained in psychedelic-assisted therapy and end-of-life care, Rami invites people into transformative vulnerability. As a disaster responder, he helps communities devastated by climate catastrophe cope with the ongoing trauma of loss, most recently leading NECHAMA’s rebuilding efforts in Western North Carolina after Hurricane Helene.
Rami has been a consultant for Honeymoon Israel, the Jewish Federation, the Ramah Camping Movement, Hillel International, Mem Global, and local faith communities designing experiences that challenge assumptions and deepen human connection. He holds degrees in philosophy, religion and interpretation from Columbia University and the Jewish Theological Seminary of America.
Rami is an uncle, partner, sibling, son, friend, goat herder, and lover of the outdoors. He lives a nomadic lifestyle that offers space to reflect, explore, climb, hike, dance, and deepen his connection to the earth beneath his [often bare] feet. He has lived and traveled throughout Europe, India, the Middle East, South Africa, Canada, Mexico, and 46 US states, and has left pieces of his heart in the places he has called home—New England, New York, Washington, DC, Tel Aviv, Colorado, and Asheville, NC.
Artist Statement
My art is woven into the fabric of my existence, defined by the intentional ways I spend my days. It can’t be contained by studios or walls—it happens in the wild, in the body, spontaneously, in the small and the grand acts of cohering. It lives in my loving—and grieving—all of what happens to humans being.
In my work, there is no distinction between the act of living and the act of creating. The way I engage with people, the spaces I inhabit, and the thoughts I discover, all unfold as expressions of my practice. A former jazz musician, I approach life like an improvisational composition, an ongoing exercise of listening and responding, erring and readjusting, collaboration and cacophony. I flow through the world favoring unconventional pathways, where discovery and transformation take root. I create environments that value vulnerability as a gateway to deep, authentic connection and growth. Each moment, relationship, and challenge is an invitation to reinvent, sparking change and inviting people into ever-evolving iterations of life.
With an academic background in philosophy and religion, and a professional background in institutional leadership, I blend intellectual curiosity with practical wisdom, always questioning, subverting, and expanding the worlds I wander. My understanding of tradition and spirituality is anything but conventional, rooted in a constant unfolding of new ideas.
Nature is integral to my being—I embrace the world in its raw, unfiltered beauty. My passions for music, dance, rock climbing, hiking, and biking are manifestations of my work—balancing freedom and groundedness, spirit and body, ecstatic and mundane.
