Dinah Rose Foley

Dinah Foley was rambling around Portland, Oregon one day in 2007 when she stumbled on a unicycle gang playing polo in a park. A fan of clowns and all things circus-adjacent, Dinah struck up a conversation. Soon after, she was racing down
a dusty cyclocross course in Rainier on one wheel.
“I anticipate being the most amateur in the race,”
she said, “but I’ll be having the most fun.” 

Fun was Dinah’s North. It took her from Olympia to Hawaii, Taiwan, Atlanta, and finally to New York. Along the way, she was runner-up for Portland’s Funniest Person, played a construction worker in a video for the Trump Has Tiny Hands PAC and busked alongside a beatboxing cellist on the street in Thailand. But she was guided just as much by her principles. By 35, she had organized unions on two coasts, earned a Master’s degree in social work, supported clients as they coped with trauma and helped to pass legislation through the New York City Council.

Artistic, well read and fiercely competitive, she was a writer who also honed talents as varied as wax casting, sailing, piñata construction, Boggle, spaying feral cats, squirrel indexing, magic tricks and playing the theremin. Her magnetism drew people in and she kept them close, texting on birthdays and corresponding across years and continents. She made people feel seen, inspired and loved. To be loved by Dinah felt precious. 

Dinah Rose Foley was born in Olympia, Washington on July 15, 1989, a Cancer sun, Sagittarius moon and Libra rising. She was the middle child of Jim Foley and Nancy Heinrich, between her brothers Nick and Finn. Every morning before school, she sat on the bathroom counter as her dad pulled her hair into a signature do: a high, tight bun, hardened with hairspray and secured with a neon scrunchy. Dinah figured that if she wanted to be an Olympic gymnast, the hair was the place to start. 

The Foleys’ beautiful, sprawling house in Olympia was the hub for all the kids’ friends. They hosted epic Easter egg hunts every spring in the yard, where Dinah and her brothers logged countless hours on the zipline. Dinah’s eyes sparkled when she had a plan for a prank, a music video, an adventure. She convinced even her earliest co-conspirators the world was theirs to lose. 

During her teens, she fell in with a rapscallious
group of art-freak girls, seven of whom formed the rap group Gyunyunyu and the Science Fun Station. Performing in lab coats and goggles, they played house shows around Olympia, rapping to the beats of a Casio keyboard. 

At 17, she dropped out of high school and moved
to Portland. She and her friends biked everywhere, dreamed big and schemed endlessly. In the rap duo The Alphabetix, she choreographed dances and wrote verses for tracks like “Fur Bikini” – “don’t sharpen your razor when you can sharpen your senses.” Once, during a performance at the
Gay Straight Alliance prom in Bend, Dinah accidentally flashed a room full of high school kids. The crowd went wild.

That enduring curiosity and distaste for staying
still took Dinah to a permaculture farm in Hawaii and to Taiwan, where she taught English. She navigated winding mountain roads on a rickety moped and traveled across Southeast Asia, fearless and wild, picking up friends along the way. Her magic made those around her braver, more confident versions of themselves.

Dinah was adored by her students, fellow teachers and all manner of creatures. Among them was a tiny chihuahua with a deformed back leg. Dinah adopted him, fed him medicine from an eyedropper and named him Ernest. Throughout her life, Dinah took in dozens of animals — no less than eight kittens during the pandemic alone. In New York, she met Dudley, a pomeranian of uncertain age, who she cared for until he died. They celebrated his quinceañera, followed by his sweet 16. One Halloween, she strapped a papier-mâché alien to Dudley’s back, his leash snaking up to a UFO. Wearing a unitard twinkling with rhinestone constellations, Dinah was the sky. 

A regular in Portland’s comedy scene, she harnessed her sharp wit to skewer a society she thought should do better. But she wasn’t one to heckle from the sidelines. In her mid 20s, she became a union organizer. “This is top secret shhhhh supreme,” she wrote to a friend when she got a job on the graveyard shift at a local factory to do undercover organizing, a controversial approach in labor circles. “The conditions and pay are terrible and could be improved hugely by a union contract.” Activism gave her a path out of the service industry and a sense of purpose. In 2015, she took the stage at a Bernie Sanders rally in Portland as a proud member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, telling the crowd of nearly 30,000 it was time to demand a living wage for all. 

A fluent Spanish speaker, Dinah took a job at an industrial bakery staffed by mostly immigrant workers. She grew close to people over nearly a year of organizing. When the union vote failed, she was devastated. The loss was part of what drew her to New York and a fresh start. She sublet a friend’s room in a rambling art house in Bushwick, throwing vegan dinner parties for 20 and forming a community that became family. In 2019, she graduated from Columbia University with a Master’s in social work. Even the Ivy League couldn’t tame her. She excelled as the Columbia mascot, Roar-ee the Lion, until she was unceremoniously relieved of her duties after she took a knee during “The Star-Spangled Banner” at a football game. 

Though Dinah left professional organizing behind in Portland, she never gave up the fight. She planned a protest with the Democratic Socialists of America that shut down Manhattan’s West Side Highway and lobbied to grant immigrants better access to city IDs. She took friends to Pennsylvania to canvas for Bernie and got chased by a man with a gun after stealing a Trump flag from his front yard. 

As a social worker at the Brooklyn Defenders Services immigration practice, she walked alongside her clients, always doing more than her job description. Dinah was, by the consensus of those who loved her, a terrible driver, but when a client wanted to learn how to drive so they could work for Uber Eats, Dinah enthusiastically gave them lessons. When Brooklyn Defenders decided to unionize, Dinah was a guide and a cheerleader. It was her last campaign and they won handily. 

In 2024, she left Brooklyn Defenders to build her own therapy practice. She was drawn to helping people navigate ambivalence and grief because she thought deeply about the complexity of being alive. She knew love and heartbreak. She longed “to feel passionate about something that is self-trancendent” and understood “how much strength and wisdom can be found in nimble vulnerability.” A core of her practice was Internal Family Systems, a theory that posits that we contain disparate “parts,” like members of a family, each with its own motivations. But she believed that like families, those parts can heal and coexist. 

Dinah was always a full participant. In conversation. In activism. In play. In karaoke. She could take the mic for “When I’m With You,” do a backflip during the bridge, and make it back for the next verse. No matter how raucous the party, she found time to ask how you were doing, and if the person you were dating had good politics. 

She expected a lot of the world, and even more of herself, keeping lists of things she resolved to do. “Write often, freely. Develop my practice… Take care of my body, love my friends wildly. Be gracious, be generous, protect boundaries.” Her last spring was spent canvassing for Zohran Mamdani, baking for neighbors, pressing friends into one more round of Scattergories and generally doing her best to make sure everyone around her was OK. 

Dinah died on May 22, 2025. Those who love her have been on one of her scavenger hunts, trying to puzzle her death into coherence. We’ll keep looking for her in dappled light bouncing off the bow of a sailboat in the harbor, and out on the second line, when the sun catches a string of sequins and casts a rainbow against the asphalt. Or maybe we’ll comb the internet and find Dinah smiling in sunglasses with her face turned toward the sky, cuddling a rooster, doing a handstand in a rainforest or in a red dress at her father’s memorial at the Olympia Yacht Club. 

That day, she told the loved ones gathered that her dad believed in talking to the dead. Goodbyes need not be so final. She ended with Henry Scott-Holland’s poem, “Death is Nothing at All”:

Everything remains exactly as it was.

I am I,

 and you are you,

and the old life that we lived so fondly together is untouched, unchanged.

Whatever we were to each other, that we are still.

Call me by the old familiar name.

Speak of me in the easy way which you always used.

Put no difference into your tone.

Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow.

Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes that we enjoyed together.

Play, smile, think of me, pray for me.

Let my name be ever the household word that it always was.

Let it be spoken without an effort, without the ghost of a shadow upon it.