Hi, I'm Elli Smith,
and I believe the old structures are crumbling so something more alive can take their place.
I’ve always loved exploring. Some of the thresholds I’ve crossed were on purpose. Some weren’t. Either way, I always come back to tell you what’s on the other side. I’ve always been drawn to art, too. I believe it’s less something you hang on a wall and more an expressive pathway, a way through. Though I’ll admit, the pictures look good on the wall too.
I studied Art History at Berkeley, then Arts in Education at Harvard. It’s where I learned art is how people find their way back to themselves. For over twenty years, I’ve mentored and worked creatively with people of all ages. Making films and podcasts, with Native communities in the Pacific Northwest and in post-Katrina New Orleans schools. Hundreds of hours spent listening to people find the shape of their own stories.
I’ve danced on boats. Floated in the Arctic. Traveled a fair amount and had some pretty peak experiences on this earth. I’ve also sat in a dentist’s office reading a Highlights magazine, bored out of my mind, biting my nails. Felt anxiety. Gotten stressed over how many passwords I’ve had to make up. Every threshold, big or small, teaches you the same thing: the crossing is disorienting, and it’s survivable, and you come back different, usually more yourself, not less.
I’ve made my way through academia as well as certification programs. I’m certified through the Feminine Frequency Business School, a program that blends business strategy with feminine leadership and spiritual depth. I’m also a certified Heart Coach, trained under Annie Lalla. I’d put both on a business card, if people still used those.
What I Believe, Standing Here Right Now
I’m an inherently hopeful person. That doesn’t mean I’m always happy, or even content. It means I keep finding my way back to hope, and to the good in what’s already here.
I know what it’s like to go numb. To let life get so overwhelming that you start reaching for anything that makes it stop for a minute, whether that’s a substance or just the quiet, practiced habit of detaching from your own emotion.
I don’t think that makes anyone broken. I think it makes them human. And I think the real work is finding your way back to the feeling you were avoiding. Back to the whole bouquet of what it means to be alive, grief and joy and rage and delight, all of it. That bouquet is what makes us human. Helping people reconnect to it is the work I do.
I’m tired of the divisive stories we’re being fed. I don’t think they’re serving any of us.
I believe actually meeting another person is how we build the bridges that let us feel joy, connection, and fully alive.
I believe getting to know somebody else is a chance to get to know deeper parts of ourselves. That can be delightful, enraging, frustrating, cool, all of it. But it’s ultimately an opportunity to grow.
Creativity bubbles out of us before anyone teaches us to be careful with it. Watch any kid draw, build, imagine, explore. Nobody has to convince them to make something. Somewhere along the way, most of us go quiet about it.
I want to help people reconnect with that. Not later, once things settle down. Now. The world needs your creativity. Your life needs your creative solutions. It needs you, specifically, the one reading this sentence right now. Yes. You.
Connect to the dream first. Then work backwards. Build the thing so you can experience it, and so everyone standing near you gets to experience it too.
This Earth is a gorgeous garden of delight. We are lucky, almost unreasonably lucky, to be alive in this exact moment.
And the old structures, the ones that told us who to be and how to prove it, are crumbling. In that space is where the seeds we plant today will grow. That’s where my interest lives, seeding the future with our imagination.
