This article brings together interdisciplinary perspectives from three artist-scholars. More specifically, we examine the impact of performances of listening and care in works addressing connections to personal identity, trauma, and violence and the anxieties that these can provoke in our roles as artists, researchers, and pedagogues. We ask: how can embodied witnessing help to reimagine the concepts of agency and risk when engaging with stories of trauma, violence, and suffering? How do these concepts help us to foster critical self-reflexivity and care in our relationships with others, the materials we use, and the spaces we inhabit?