Herclayheart is Los Angeles-based creative duo Carla Richmond Coffing (2014 PDN30) and Hanne Steen (2014 PEN Emerging Voices Fellow). We met in 2010 and have been collaborating ever since. With our multi-media platform, we use photography, sound, video, and prose to create evocative and heartfelt content across a wide range of subjects and themes. 

Between the two of us we have lived in Mexico City, Nairobi, Kigali, Bangui, Boston, Paris, Madrid, New York, Indianapolis, Oakland, London, and Los Angeles, and our work stems from an innate curiosity about what it means to be human beyond cultural and societal lines. In holding space for others to tell their stories, we discover who we are.

Our photography and written word project Lovers Shirts went viral in 2014 and continues to be widely published all over the world. We have been commissioned by and published in The UK Sunday Times, Huffington Post, Feature Shoot, Vanity Fair, The Atlantic Re:think, Volvo, and UCLA Magazine, among others. 

Our role is not as passive observers, but rather as active participants. We begin our work from an understanding that we are reflections of one another, and we aim to hold space for each individual experience, to weave it into a collective story, and to reflect the world back to itself, in all its complex, chaotic beauty.