It doesn't have to be so hard.
And I'm saying that from the middle of it.
Hi, I’m Leah
I built an arts organization and a creative business with zero experience. The debt, the burnout, hiring my friends and losing them, the moments where I couldn't tell where the work ended and I began. But here's what I keep coming back to: the hard parts weren't the problem. They were the path.
I'm not someone who figured it out. I'm still in the middle of it. I'm just someone who stopped fighting the unfolding and learned how to help other people do the same.
Not through a framework or a keynote. Through a room. Through paint and music and an experience that cuts through everything you've been carrying and leaves you feeling lighter, more creative, more connected to something true in yourself.
.
I didn’t plan any of this.
At 24 I got on a plane to Kenya to photograph global dementia. No plan, just an artist chasing a creative call she couldn't quite explain yet. That pull eventually led me back home and into building DAC, an arts organization I started with zero business experience, painting murals on the side because I genuinely had no idea how running a business worked. It should have failed. And in 2023, it almost did. I had the option to dissolve DAC, and then two weeks later received a $150,000 grant and got the chance to try again.
What followed was years of painful, humbling, beautiful proof that you don't have to have it all figured out to build something real. You just have to keep saying yes to the thing that keeps calling you.
I don't have a success story. I have a purpose story. And there's a real difference between the two. A success story has a destination. A purpose story just keeps unfolding, messier and more beautiful than you planned, taking you places you never would have chosen for yourself.
I didn't grow up next to a business. I grew up next to my mission. And everything I now bring into a room came from watching that unfold, through the failures, the pivots, the moments I almost quit and somehow didn't.
Purpose isn't something you find. It's something you keep saying yes to, even when you can't see where it leads.
Sometimes, up Mt. Kilimanjaro.
Purpose in Progress
It's not a motivational talk, an icebreaker, or a team bonding activity to fill time before the keynote. Purpose in Progress is a full experiential room. This experience is built for leaders, founders, and anyone who's tired of talking about purpose and ready to actually feel it.
Here's what happens: you pick up a paint color and a brush. You close your eyes, and I lead you through tying your purpose to that color. You open your eyes, and I put on curated music specifically for this moment so you can forget about everything else besides painting. And then you paint — keeping your color and brush the whole time, moving around the massive canvas every 20 seconds, adding your mark to something much bigger than yourself.
At the end, the painting gets lifted up for the whole room to see. And that's when it lands. Every color matters, even the ones we don't like. Every mark is part of something no one person could have made alone, because each of our purposes is unfolding into something so much bigger than we could ever imagine creating on our own.
That's not a metaphor. That's not a metaphor. That's your purpose, and you just made it visible.
This experience lives in retreats, leadership gatherings, and any room brave enough to stop performing and start feeling.
Developing Artist Collaboration (DAC)
The proof that this work is real.
A decade ago I started an arts organization from scratch with no roadmap and no business training. DAC has served over a thousand creatives, generated more than $2.1 million in artist sales, built hundreds of public art events from scratch, and developed Emerge — our flagship creative business development program, inspired by my own journey figuring out how to build a creative business (and yes, we light stuff on fire).
I built it. I almost lost it. I rebuilt it. And then I learned to let it outlast me (well, I'm working on it).
That decade is where everything I now bring into a room came from.
Explore My Creations
The proof that I make cool art.
For over a decade I've been making art that lives in the world like murals on restaurant walls, children's hospitals, music festivals, and beyond.
I painted to survive (or pay my taxes!) I squeezed creative projects into the margins of a very full-time job and called it a career.
Now the art I make looks a little different. It looks like a room full of people standing around a massive canvas, painting their purpose into something they couldn't have made alone.
It looks like the innovative programs and public-arts events of DAC.
I still take on commissions and projects when they align with the season I'm in. But the brush means something different to me now than it used to.