The Serendipity Seeking Lab

​​The Serendipity Seeking Lab

​Most of our days have a script. Sometimes it's written out in the form of calendars, tasks, emails to respond to👩‍💻...other times it's in the route we take to work, the podcast we put in our headphones, the way we move through public space without really being there at all. This is what modern culture has encouraged us to do: plan, manage, and optimize our time.

​Yet in all of this, we're often missing what actually makes us feel alive: mystery, surprise, unexpected connection🔥

The stranger whose world briefly overlaps with ours in line at the coffee shop, cracking a smile at the person wearing a hat from our university on the train, or moment of play that emerges when a frisbee lands at our feet as we walk through the park and we toss it back to the kids eagerly waiting.

​🌻 When is the last time you connected by chance, on purpose?🌻

​The Serendipity Seeking Lab is a playful, low-pressure space to practice exactly that (together!) It is a place to practice loosening our grip on control to see what's already around us through the following format:
- Gather and land at Reforesters Lab 🌿
- Connect & receive an intro to the practice of Serendipity Seeking✨
- Venture out into the surrounding streets and parks to try it out yourself🤸
- Return, share what emerged, and unpack together 🫂

​If you're curious, come connect by chance, on purpose.
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I created this space for those who've done the therapy, breathwork, somatic releases, but are ready to put that inner work to the test and OPEN UP to dance with life outside these containers. To try a different relationship with the unplanned: trusting your desires, staying curious, setting boundaries, and building resiliency in engaging with what's right in front of you.

​After running these experiences in parks and public spaces across New York, I'm so glad to have a home for this at Reforesters.

​The more we roll the dice, the better we get at loving what we find 🎲

​Led By: Kate Russell

​Kate Russell is a Brooklyn-based experience designer, facilitator, and artist whose work explores the conditions for unexpected connection.

​After an MBA from UVA and a decade in tech startups, she became less interested in expected returns and more interested in unexpected ones. She now designs participatory experiences, public art installations, and performance works that help people loosen control, practice presence, and meet each other more openly. Deep studies in 5Rhythms, clown, improvisation, and ritual theater, have shaped how she thinks about embodiment, presence, and what it takes to stay open to the unknown.

​Recent works include The Tree of Becoming (2025), an interactive installation inside a transformed U-Haul truck engaging over 350 strangers in a collective ritual; New York Portal Authority (2025), a citywide open-world game for Sony Pictures reactivating obsolete payphones across four NYC boroughs; Playborhood (2025), an emergent public movement series in Brooklyn parks; and Serendipity Signal (2024), an anonymous two-person intercom installation. Her work has reached 3,200+ people across New York City.

​Kate is Texan-native who calls Brooklyn is home, but has spent much of the last three years studying human connection across more than 25 countries, from India to Iceland, Mexico to Brazil, recording hundreds of intimate conversations with strangers and asking what it actually takes to open to one another. This has lead her to maintain a daily practice of Serendipity Seeking, connecting by chance–on purpose, which guides her creative work and life.

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​Come Early to Elevate Your Experience with Adaptogenic Foods and Teas

​Reforesters Laboratory is an experimental adaptogenic cafe and sound clinic located in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. We utilize music – including spatial, sub-bass-centered, and organic instrumentation – along with breathwork, meditation, art, plant care and adaptogenic, nutritional foods + beverages to cultivate kindness—both physical and spiritual. We aim to create an environment that offers peace, space, and clarity, helping people understand the connections between themselves, their communities, and the world around them. To that end, we offer affordable "pay what you can" ticket options on all events and classes.