The Wonderlust
sTorytelling
institute

We believe that the people who have lived between cultures carry stories the world urgently needs to hear.

We are a creative incubator. We provide the tools to find the story, the skills to shape it, and the community to sustain the writer who tells it. Our work begins on the page and ends on the stage or the screen, in front of audiences who may never have heard a story like this one before.

The Wonderlust Storytelling Institute is a sponsored project of Social Good Fund, a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization

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Jennifer Erie spent more than 20 years as a Foreign Service Officer and Peace Corps Volunteer, working across Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. When that career ended, she did what a growing number of people in our community have thought about doing, she sat down and wrote a book about it.

Her memoir, “The World in My Bones: The Diplomat Queens Made”, turns decades of identity, family, service, loss, and reinvention into a story readers even outside her field can truly relate to. That’s the exact challenge our storytellers are wrestling with too, turning a life once captured in impact reports and shared among fellow Foreign Service officers into a story that any audience can connect with on a human level.

In her session, Jennifer will walk participants through her own writing process, and how she made choices about which parts of her career and her life were hers to tell, and how she wanted to tell them. For a cohort full of people deciding the same thing about their own stories, this is a rare kind of guidance.

Applications for our inaugural writer’s cohort close this weekend! If you’ve been on the fence about applying, this is your sign to go for it. We can promise that you will never regret taking a chance on yourself and telling your story.

We already believe you’re a writer, and we’re so ready to help you see that!

If you’re ready to take the leap and apply, you can do that in the link in our bio. If you have any questions before you hit submit, feel free to DM us!

Storytelling is more than just a fun thing to do, it’s so much more. It’s how we learn to understand life and each other. We learn about the world and the people around us and why they are they way they are through a lens of empathy rather than judgement. It’s not just a trending thing to talk about or a new form of expressing yourself, storytelling is necessary to the human experience.

While we have been saying you have a story WORTH telling, we also hope you hear us loud and clear when we say we NEED your story.

That’s why we built this organization and cohort. We know it can be vulnerable to tell your story, but we’ve designed a program where you don’t need to know how to do it “correctly”, you just need to have a willingness to share your experiences with the world.

Apply to learn how to tell your story at the link in bio.

(P.S. this clip was from our conversation with My Career Pivot on Substack, and if you’re a subscriber of theirs, they’re offering a $500 scholarship!)

Every program is built on a set of beliefs, and ours starts here: everyone has a story worth sharing, and everyone is capable of creativity, regardless of experience or training.

We built the Wonderlust Storytelling Institute around the idea that people who have lived across cultures carry something the world needs right now, the ability to find common ground where others see only difference. Storytelling becomes the bridge.

Swipe through to see the philosophy behind our program, and tap the link in our bio to learn more about our inaugural cohort.✨

First drafts are supposed to be bad. Marina Zurita is honest enough to say that to our writers, so we can drop the pressure that that isn’t true.

As a theater director who has shepherded new work through readings, workshops, and full productions across New York and DC, Marina has watched a lot of writers freeze at this “bad first draft” stage. Her session with our cohort is built to name that fear directly and give participants permission to write badly on the way to writing well.

Expect honesty about her own process, the doubts that don’t go away just because you’ve directed at the Kennedy Center, and a clear case for revision as the actual practice, not a failure to get it right the first time.

Our storytellers will walk away from this session with fewer excuses and more pages. That’s the goal!

Ready to start on your first draft?
Applications for our inaugural cohort are open now. Link in bio ✨

Alejandro was three years old the first time his family had to leave everything behind. It would not be the last.

From Uruguay to Venezuela, from a childhood he still carries with him to fifteen years driving a taxi in Miami, Alejandro’s story is one of adaptation, loss, and the quiet work of finding your way back to yourself. Today, he’s a musician who says he feels most fully himself with a guitar in his hands, and who describes his superpower simply: putting his heart into everything he does.

Stories like Alejandro’s are exactly why the Wonderlust Storytelling Institute exists. We believe everyone carries a story worth telling, especially the ones shaped by living between cultures, between countries, and between versions of ourselves.

Swipe through to hear more of his journey, and tap the link in our bio to learn more about our inaugural cohort ✨

You asked, we listened!

After so many conversations with incredible storytellers, we hear your requests that you just needed a little more time! So we’ve extended the deadline to 8/16 🎉

If you have any questions, feel free to DM us!

If you have been sitting with an idea, a story, a feeling you cannot quite shake, this is the moment to bring it forward. Our inaugural cohort of the Wonderlust Storytelling Institute is filling up, and applications are closing soon.

You do not need writing experience. You do not need a finished idea. You just need the story that keeps finding its way back to you, and the willingness to spend twelve weeks giving it shape alongside a community that understands what it means to live between worlds.

Diplomats, refugees, immigrants, third culture kids, humanitarian workers, missionaries, military folks, and anyone else shaped by a life lived across cultures: we built this for you.

Applications close soon, so if you have been meaning to apply, now is the time.

Head to the link in our bio to apply ✨

📣 Meet your guides! 📣

Our inaugural cohort will spend twelve weeks learning from people who are still actively working in the field, not just teaching from memory of it.

Taylor Blackman and Davon Williams both split their time between the classroom and the stage, which means the craft they’re teaching is the same craft they’re using right now in their own commissions, productions, and premieres.

That’s the kind of mentorship we knew we needed to prioritize for this program, and we couldn’t be more excited to bring it to our first cohort of writers this fall.

Want to learn from these amazing directors and artists?? Apply to our cohort via the link in bio! ✨

Our hope is for every piece that’s written by our cohort to have life beyond our showcase, and that’s what Jyotsna Hariharan wants our cohort thinking about from day one!

She’s spent her career moving between mediums: theater, film, TV, audio, humor writing, and she’s bringing that range into her session on building stories that can grow beyond the stage. She’s going to help our writers create something so specific and alive on stage that all creating for the other formats just makes sense.

Our writers will leave her session with a sharper sense of how the choices they make now in a script written for eight actors and a stage will shape what that story is capable of becoming later. This is craft thinking, and it’s going to makes a strong theatrical draft even stronger.

We’re so excited for our cohort to learn from her! Want to be one of those people?
Applications for our inaugural cohort are open now! Link in bio.

Feeling like an outsider is one of the most universal experiences there is, even when the reasons behind it look completely different from person to person.

That feeling is at the heart of why we built the Wonderlust Storytelling Institute. Our 12 week curriculum takes emerging storytellers through the fundamentals of writing a compelling narrative, guest lectures from industry professionals, interactive group work with their cohort, and a full lab week to develop their piece. It all builds toward a final showcase, where participants share their story on stage in front of the public and industry professionals.

Every story is worth telling. We built the program to help people actually tell it. 🎙️

Applications are closing soon, so head to our link in bio to apply today!

#dctheaterscene #dctheatre #dcwriters #livingabroad

Chances are, you’ve sat at a table with a coworker or friend who’s incredible at telling their stories of living abroad for education, working overseas, immigrating to D.C., or growing up as a third culture kid. They tell the kind of stories where each character comes to life and you think, “I could listen to this for hours”.

This is who we build this cohort for: the person carrying vibrant stories with them as they live their everyday lives. We’ve developed a curriculum that allows these stories to be brought to life regardless of writing experience-they just need to have a story and a passion to tell it.

Who comes to mind? Tag them and let them know you believe they have a story to tell!

Why a play? Why theatre? ✨

At a moment when so much of what we watch is generated, curated, or algorithm-fed, we keep coming back to the oldest medium there is. A room full of people, breathing the same air, witnessing a story that only exists in that exact moment. That is the kind of presence our cohort gets to practice and create.

Swipe through for why we built the Wonderlust Storytelling Institute on a stage. 🎭

You don’t have to be a professional writer to be in the cohort. In fact, we built this understanding so many of you will be carving space to learn and write in the midst of your everyday life, just like Ariel.

She was laid off from her job and grieving her father when a friend mentioned a storytelling workshop. She figured now was as good a time as any to try it. Weeks later, she stood in front of an audience and told a story about her dad, her identity, and what it meant to finally be seen. She says she’s never felt more held.

She still works a full time job that has nothing to do with storytelling. But it’s the practice that keeps her grounded. Her advice to anyone who doesn’t think they’re “creative enough”: it’s a muscle. Use it, and it changes you, even if it never becomes your career.

You don’t need a writing background to have a story worth telling. You just need the willingness to tell it.
Applications for our inaugural cohort are open now. Link in bio.

When Hannah decided to stage Vacate, she knew it had to happen in DC. This city holds one of the most vibrant theatre scenes in the country, and most people outside it (or even in it) have no idea. She wanted her story to live inside this creative community, and three months after she wrote the play, it sold out. That night confirmed what she already believed, that DC audiences crave stories like these. We are so excited to be building something to bring even more writers and audiences in to this vibrant community of theatre lovers. For more information, visit the link in our bio!

#Dctheater #dcwriters #dctheaterscene #thirdculturekid #dcplaywrights

We are so thrilled to welcome Emily Best as a guest lecturer for our inaugural cohort! Emily is the founder and CEO of Seed&Spark, the world’s leading crowdfunding platform for storytellers, having helped creators raise over $86M for independent, mission-driven work. She has produced films and series that premiered at Sundance, SXSW, and Tribeca, including RATIFIED, which aired on Independent Lens this fall.

There is no one better suited than Emily to speak about what it takes to self-produce new work and bring it to audiences, which is exactly what we hope our fellows will do with their own projects. We are incredibly excited that our students will have the opportunity to learn from her!

Want to learn from Emily? Our cohort applications are open!

Our founder, Hannah, is a third culture kid. By being raised in an international school in England with American parents, she knows firsthand the power that life experience has to be able to connect with people who are different from you.

And the stories that are unique to that lived experience are ones that the world needs to hear right now. They are stories of belonging, identity, family, friendships, love and connection. DC is filled with third culture kids – children of immigrants and diplomats, military families, expats. They have all had to live in cultures unfamiliar to them and make them their home.

And those are the exact types of stories that belong at the Wonderlust Storytelling Institute.

If you’re a third culture kid looking to bring your story to life, applications are open until August 7th (link in bio).

Tag any D.C. based third culture kids you know whose stories you love!

Questions? DM us!

Three months after she finished writing her first play, Hannah Peterson had sold out a DC theater.

She had never written for the stage before. She had no theater training and no industry background. What she had was Vacate, a play about the emotional reality of immigration, drawn from her years living outside the United States and building connections across cultures.

The cast of twenty five included a former USAID foreign service officer, a man whose father had been deported, and a woman from Pakistan who was once denied an education and is now pursuing her second master’s degree at Georgetown. It resonated because it was written and performed by people who had lived the stories they were telling.

Hannah’s experience is proof that you don’t need a writing degree or a theater background to tell a powerful story. You just need to have lived one. If you are a veteran, diplomat, missionary, refugee, third culture kid, or anyone who has spent significant time living across cultures, you are exactly who the Wonderlust Storytelling Institute was built for. Through workshops, mentorship, and collaboration with industry professionals, you will learn how to shape your lived experiences into a compelling script. You will leave with a staged preview of your work and a clear path to develop it further. Every story is worth telling, including yours.

Link in bio to apply

Meet the Wonderlust Storytelling Institute Team!

Ma Troggian is our subject matter expert!

Ma is a Brazilian multi-artist based in NYC whose work spans acting, filmmaking, and music-making. A self-taught screenwriter, Ma’s first feature script, Foreign, was shortlisted for the competitive Sundance Development Track. Her short script, The Love of Jupiter, won the 2022 PANO Microgrants and was selected for the 2022 Open Screenplay M Film Lab. In 2024, she wrote, co-directed, and acted in the vampire short film The Death Dance. In 2021, Ma received the City Artist Corps Grant to curate the third edition of Make Music Don’t Get Killed, a showcase uplifting queer, underrepresented performers and musicians in Brooklyn.

Swipe to hear from Ma, and say hello to her in the comments!

Even though to some, this question doesn’t make sense, it was a question one of our participants got asked her whole life, and it became something she finally had the words to answer through storytelling.

That’s the work of the Wonderlust Storytelling Institute: taking a lived experience shaped by culture, distance, and identity, and giving it the structure and support to become a story an audience can witness.

Applications for our inaugural cohort are open. Link in bio for details.

We’ve envisioned a room full of so many stories: people with all kinds of reasons they’ve lived in another country besides home, who have a story ready to be told and passion to tell it (regardless of whether they’ve written before or not).

Will you be there?

Applications are open until August 7th and our DMs are open if you have any questions!

Meet the Wonderlust Storytelling Institute Team!

Ariel is our Instructional Designer!

Ariel leads programs and designs technology-enabled products that truly work for the people they serve, and the teams that make that happen. With 10+ years of experience in monitoring and evaluation, participatory research methods, behavior change research, human-centered design, and learning & training design across global contexts, Ariel is fluent in how quality products and services get built, evaluated, iterated, refined and actually used. She possesses expertise in digital health-system strengthening, learning and training design and facilitation, and leveraging human-centered design and monitoring & evaluation to drive evidence-based outcomes.

Ariel has worked so hard alongside Ma (who you’ll meet next week) to make sure this cohort is structured for equipping you and supporting you in your journey to tell your story!

Swipe to hear from Ariel, and say hello to her in the comments!

We built this cohort framework to make sure that, regardless of previous writing experience, our writers feel safe and supported to tell their stories.

And we know that in these settings, feedback can build you up or shut you down, and the difference is all in how it’s structured. In our program, every session will follow Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process, so writers hear what moved the room first, then ask for the feedback they want. No unsolicited notes, just trust.

Applications for our inaugural cohort are open now through August 7. No writing experience is required. We’ll give you the framework to learn and the feedback to grow.

Link in bio! 🎙️✨

The World Cup is showing the whole world something: nearly one in four players this year are representing a country different from the one they were born in, and their stories are proof that identity was never meant to fit inside one passport.

Swipe through to see what we’ve been noticing all summer, from players choosing who to represent and how they carry home with them, to the way host cities like Boston have opened themselves up, to fans from around the globe.

Every story is worth telling, on the pitch and off it. If your story has ever needed more than one country, one language, or one clean answer to “where are you from?,” our inaugural cohort wants to hear it.

Applications close August 7. Link in bio. 🌍⚽

Meet the Wonderlust Storytelling Institute team!

Hannah Peterson is our Executive Director!

She spent almost 14 years working in Latin America and Africa on education, digital health, and innovative finance projects before she was forced to pivot as so many others were following the closure of USAID. She wrote her first play, Vacate, in January 2025 and performed it in April 2025 to a sold-out audience at Joe’s Movement Emporium. It is there that she found the power of storytelling and her ability to tell stories that connect people and build empathy.

Swipe to see what Hannah’s feeling about the inaugural storytelling cohort beginning this fall! Want to be a part of it? You can apply at the link in our bio!

Thinking about applying to our Institute Cohort, but have some questions?
Swipe through for the full picture of the institute: What it is. Who it’s for. Whether you need writing experience (spoiler: you don’t).

Every story is worth telling, and in these twelve weeks, we’ll help you tell that story through a script, a live staged preview, and a clear vision for where your story goes next, whether that’s the stage, film, podcast, or beyond.

Applications are open now through August 7th! Link in bio.

Questions? Feel free to reach out!

In early 2025, Hannah Peterson lost her 14-year career in international development when USAID was shut down. With no theater experience and no writing background, she sat down and wrote a play about what it actually feels like to live between cultures, not as a policy debate, but as a human one.
Three months later, that play, Vacate, sold out a DC theater. The cast of 25 included a former USAID foreign service officer, a man whose father had been deported, and a woman from Pakistan now pursuing her second master’s at Georgetown. People who had lived the story were the ones telling it, and the audience felt every bit of that.

That night proved something we couldn’t ignore: there are thousands of people across the DMV carrying stories just as powerful, who’ve never had the structure, support, or platform to shape them into something an audience can witness.
If you’re an immigrant, a diplomat, a refugee, a third-culture kid, a humanitarian aid worker, or anyone who has built a life across borders, this is for you.

You don’t need a writing background. You don’t need a finished idea. You just need a story pulling at you and the willingness to start telling it.

And we are thrilled to announce that applications for our inaugural cohort are open today 🎉

Twelve weeks, expert mentorship, and a live staged preview of your work in front of industry professionals.

Apply now, link in bio.

If you have ever lived outside your home country for at least a year, we know that there’s a collection of stories that you gathered along the way. 📍

Maybe there was an experience, theme you noticed, or character that has stayed with you, ready to be turned in to a creative piece.

We firmly believe you have a story sitting within you that you’ve never had the time, training, or community to shape into something an audience can witness, so we’ve built this program for you.

You don’t need a writing background. You just need a story you’re ready to tell.

Applications open Monday, so keep an eye out 👀

🎙️ Questions? Our DMs and comments are open.

#EveryStoryIsWorthTelling #WonderlustStorytellingInstitute

We were so fortunate to have our amazing team member @matroggian attend the Storytelling Summit at the Tribeca Film Festival in NYC last week. She was able to listen in on critical discussions facing the media industry right now including funding, self-production, attracting an audience to your project and stories that reflect this moment we’re living in.

We are grateful for these insights as we continue to shape our strategy for Wonder Productions and the curriculum for the Wonderlust Storytelling Institute!

#storytelling #tribecafilmfestival #nycartscene #filmmakers #wonder

We met Nicolas when he participated in our last Wonderlust event. He is a third culture kid who is Chinese but was born and raised in El Salvador. He also happens to be one of Washington DC’s most prominent artists. His perspective truly embodies the types of storytellers we want to feature through Wonder Productions.

We are so grateful to have collaborated with the extremely talented @azhoufilm to produce this video to share Nicolas’ story!

We hope you enjoy watching this video. The full video can be found on YouTube at the link in our bio!

#storytelling #thirdculturekid #wonder #washingtondcartist

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The Wonderlust sTorytelling institute