i'm Lisa Woods. black American humanitarian, writer, mental health advocate. i've spent 15+years in emergency response across Haiti, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Myanmar, the Bahamas, and Ukraine — coordinating health services in the worst weeks of people's lives.

i arrived in Kyiv in November 2022 for what was supposed to be a six-month deployment. three and a half years later, i'm still here.

i'm the co-founder of MedPsy Foundation, a Ukrainian NGO providing specialized trauma care to war-affected populations through a clinical partnership with Expio Clinic. we work at the intersection of psychiatric medicine, integrated trauma focused therapies, somatic practice, and ketamine-assisted therapy for people whose nervous systems have been rewired by war.

i write Under the Siren — a serialized memoir of wartime Kyiv, new dispatches every Friday. it sits at the intersection of two cultural silences i grew up inside: black american "strength-as-silence" around help-seeking, and Soviet-era psychiatric stigma. i write about loneliness, mortality, race, refuge, and what it costs to keep showing up when the sirens won't stop.

outside the dispatches, i write about humanitarian field truths, mental health stigma, and what it means to build a life in a place most people fly out of. i'm also a 500-hour yoga practitioner working on somatic interventions for trauma.

i'm currently working on a book.

work with me:

hi@underthesiren.com

instagram: @lisanwoods / @underthesiren

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if you're a journalist, agent, editor, or potential collaborator, the best way to reach me is through, hi@underthesiren.com