Tida Beattie / The Collabyrinth

I’m the founder of The Collabyrinth, where I design and facilitate temporary botanical labyrinths for conferences, organizations, and community gatherings.

My work uses the labyrinth as a physical framework for changing pace, attention, participation, and connection in a gathering. Each installation is developed in response to its setting, audience, and purpose, with attention to site, materials, participant flow, sensory experience, facilitation, and opportunities for co-creation.

Selected Work

I have created full-scale and tabletop labyrinths for organizations and events including Future of Us at the California Institute of Integral Studies, Together Bay Area at Fort Mason, End Well in Los Angeles, Lakewood Cemetery in Minneapolis, Alameda Crisis Support Services, Western Hills Garden, and The Ruby in San Francisco.

I also maintain an independent practice of temporary and pop-up labyrinth building in public spaces, gardens, beaches, and other informal settings. These experiments are part of how I study scale, materials, impermanence, public interaction, and the relationship between a labyrinth and its site.

How I Came to This Work

I am a Veriditas-trained labyrinth facilitator and began building labyrinths in 2024 through my work in grief education and peer support.

That work grew from personal experience. After losing both of my parents within weeks of each other in 2020, during the isolation of the pandemic, I began looking for forms of support that could hold experiences of grief that were difficult to put into words.

Labyrinths became one such framework. Their physical and sensory nature gave shape to something abstract: a path to enter, a center to reach, and a way back out.

What began as part of my grief work gradually became a broader design practice. Over time, I became increasingly interested in how labyrinths could function not only as places for personal reflection, but also as participatory spaces within conferences, public gatherings, workshops, and community events.

Before The Collabyrinth

Before founding The Collabyrinth, I co-founded MESO, an initiative focused on grief and cultural bereavement.

My earlier professional life took a less linear route. I worked in hospitality with chefs Gabriela Cámara, Nancy Oakes, and Cat Cora, and began my career in financial analysis and consulting at Accenture.

I hold an MBA in international finance from Thunderbird and a BA in international relations from Johns Hopkins University.

Those different chapters continue to inform the work: hospitality taught me to think about how people experience a space; grief education taught me about care, autonomy, and presence; and my earlier business background still shapes how I think about organizations, systems, and the purpose behind a gathering.

The Practice Today

Today, my work sits at the intersection of experiential design, facilitation, natural materials, and participatory practice.

I am interested in what happens when reflection is given an actual place within a gathering: somewhere people can step out of the usual flow, move at a different pace, encounter a question physically, and decide for themselves what they want to carry forward.

The labyrinth provides the structure. What happens within it remains open.