1-800 Happy Birthday is a multi-format project rooted in love, remembrance, and care. It honors the lives of Black and Brown people lost to police violence by returning to what is most human: the act of celebration. Through voice, image, and shared ritual, the project creates space to speak names, tell stories, and mark birthdays that continue even after loss. 

The project began as a series of short films in 2014 about the histories of families who have experienced loss due to police violence and systemic racism and evolved into 1800happybirthday.com, a digital voicemail archive where loved ones and the public could leave birthday messages for individuals killed by police. 1-800 Happy Birthday later expanded into a large-scale immersive exhibition and public installation in Brooklyn, NY.  The project allows loved ones and the public to leave voicemails for the birthdays of those unjustly killed and makes the messages available for public listening. At its core, 1-800 Happy Birthday rejects the notion that memory must be anchored in tragedy. By centering birthdays instead of death, each call becomes an act of love, a defiant gesture against erasure and forgetting.

1-800 Happy Birthday is preparing for a homecoming, exhibiting in San Francisco, where it was originally created, and where it will serve as both a mirror and a confrontation. The project exposes the systems that perpetuate harm while creating space for Black and Brown communities to be seen and heard without exploitation. It challenges the myths of progress and liberalism, asking all who encounter it, from grieving families to the affluent, to reckon with the realities beneath the surface.

The Guardhouse Program is made possible thanks to generous support from the ARB Fund. 

1-800 Happy Birthday is produced by creative studio EVEN/ODD and New York based not-for-profit WORTHLESSSTUDIOS in partnership with the social justice non-profit Campaign Zero with support by the Mellon Foundation, The San Francisco Foundation, The California Endowment, the gtrippin fund at East Bay Community Foundation and other funders.