Fourteen years across brand, go-to-market, and creative production at L’Oréal Luxe, Chanel, and LVMH. As Global Marketing Director for Kiehl’s I developed products and campaigns for a €1B brand. That is where I learned how complex global organizations run, and how corporate culture both nurtures and kills good ideas. I managed dozens of agencies in those years, then co-founded one, Whooden/Studios. Since then I have advised and taught across twenty-plus organizations, from leaders at PayPal, Adidas, and Campbell’s to government capacity-building programs. In 2023 I co-founded La Maison de la Chapelle.
I am a partner at Funding the Commons, which gathers researchers, builders, policymakers, and funders around funding, governance, and coordination. I hold its seat on the UNDP Blockchain Advisory Group. From there I am co-founding Commons Lab, a Protocol Labs-backed incubator for open-source digital public infrastructure, where I sit on the board and lead partnerships, narrative, and brand. The question underneath is old and unresolved: how do communities care for shared resources when the incentives around them reward extraction?
I studied political science at the University of Chicago and Sciences Po, then took a master’s in law. What held me there was how trust networks emerge, and the tipping point of revolutions: how a few people come to trust each other enough that a system changes. This is still alive in most of what I do today.
I have practiced yoga since 2002 and taught for more than a decade. I grew up in a home where breath, beauty, and movement were revered, and where my father passed on what he knew of Eastern philosophy and traditional Chinese medicine. Soon after I started teaching I found Katonah Yoga®, a practice built on sacred geometry and Taoist thought, tuned to the seasons, that folds the body like origami and speaks in metaphor. It felt like leaving the yoga world, and it was joyful, because it was so pragmatic. My teacher Abbie Galvin once told a room that we do not open our hearts, because the heart is a pump and you do not open a pump. It was refreshing to look at a backbend as simply as “bringing the lungs to the front.” The simplicity was jarring, and it opened a great deal up. The rooms were more diverse than any I had taught in, every age in them, and teaching it gives me more joy than almost anything.
Katonah Yoga® gave me another image I have kept: the body as a house, not a temple. You live in it, you throw parties and make a mess, and then you take deep care putting everything back in its place. Leaving the vegan yoga-pants world for a broader range of experience, meat included, was liberating, and what made it safe was knowing how to come back. I also started surfing seriously in the same years, while living in New York. I would get up at four in the morning to be in the water at first light and at my desk in Hudson Yards on time. A lot shifted then: I took more risks and watched my own system consolidate.
Motherhood is another viewpoint from which I teach, and it changed both my body and the systems that run my life, work, and creative pursuits. After my first child was born I put my body back together learning Qi Gong from Dr. Te-Hsin Lo. I also studied breathwork with David Elliott, and these last years my study has moved to somatic work and the nervous system with Kimberly Ann Johnson.
