Living Studio School
Does the earth love you back.    —Robin Wall Kimmerer

 

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What if the world were alive—and you could talk to it?

Imagine moving through a city, a landscape, or even a single street as if it were a creative lab—full of hidden stories, unexpected connections, and opportunities to make something new. Now move that dial a smidge and imagine moving through the world as if it were a community of responsive, living beings. What if you could encounter trees, rivers, and stones and relate to them more directly with art, writing, or simply your presence?

Drawing on my background as a professor of art at the University of New Mexico and San Francisco Art Institute, Living Studio School offers workshops that blend structured creative exercises with the joy of discovery. This is a space for anyone—whether you’re a beginner or an experienced artist, writer, or seeker—to explore the possibility of an animate, enchanted world. These playful, structured workshops are designed to awaken your senses, spark your imagination, and help you see the familiar as extraordinary.

And yes—sometimes, the world does feel like it’s talking back.

 

Why This Matters

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Potawatomi botanist, renowned author and professor, once asked her students: Does the earth love you back? It’s a question that can change everything. If the answer is yes—or even maybe—how would that transform the way we live, especially in this time of ecological crisis?

For most of human history, animism—the belief in a living, responsive world—was the norm. Western culture has spent the last thousand years unlearning this way of seeing. But what if we remembered? What if we could shift from viewing the earth as a resource to experiencing it as a relationship?

 

My Journey

In 2020, I found myself stranded in the Peruvian Amazon for three months with Guido, an Aguaruna-mestizo curandero (healer). I returned to the Amazon many times and these experiences cracked open my worldview. Over the past six years, I’ve been piecing together how to share what I learned—how to invite others into this way of seeing. I move carefully at the edges of traditions, honoring where they are not mine while offering what is available to all of us: the chance to remember that the world is alive, and that it responds when we pay attention.

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Current and Upcoming Workshops

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Experiential Watercolor

San Miguel de Allende | Currently full—join the waitlist

This intimate class (capped at 8 participants) is designed to meet you exactly where you are. Here, presence, play, and connection take priority over rigid syllabi or formalism. While I do offer technical instruction and feedback, the focus is on spontaneous exercises tailored to the moment.

I call watercolor "the least lonely" medium because water has a mind of its own. The best practices invite you into collaboration with this fundamental earth element—so you’re not just creating art, but literally in flow with the medium itself. 

 

PsychoGeographies: Art Adventures

San Miguel de Allende | Upcoming—join the waitlist

This workshop builds on a practice I developed and taught for five years at the University of New Mexico. Now, I’ve added an explicit intention: exploring in reciprocal encounter with a re-enchanted world. This isn’t a tour—it’s an artistic and perceptual adventure through place, designed to shift how you see and interact with the everything around you.

We’ll explore locations like La Biblioteca, scenic miradors (overlooks), local art studios, Fábrica La Aurora, museums, gardens, and mercados. Sometimes, we’ll wander using Situationist dérive (drift) techniques or algorithmic walks through the city’s alleys, parks, and colonias. We’ll also meet plants with deep stories: agave, brugmansia (angel’s trumpet), and copal trees, all of which carry ancient lore across cultures.

 

Magic Plant Art Walks

San Miguel de Allende & Portland, Oregon | Upcoming—join the waitlist

This is my newest roving art studio, where we explore local plants not as objects, but as persons—beings with histories, relationships, and ways of interacting with humans across thousands of years.

What to expect:

• Angel’s Trumpet (Brugmansia): Growing in Parque Juárez, this plant is often overlooked—except when it blooms. In Amazonian cosmology, it’s one of the most powerful master plants, a threshold guardian whose teachings take humans to the edge of the void. All seven species are extinct in the wild, surviving only through human propagation, though it can be found growing across the globe. Standing next to it, you’ll learn its history and its profound relationship with humans as a teacher—its very presence is a testament to resilience and reciprocity.

• Agave: The century plant blooms only once after 25 years, sending a single stalk soaring 10 meters high before it dies. Nahua, Quetzalcoatl, Mayahuel, and Otomí cultures revere agave as a goddess and a person. Its presence is ancient, patient, and formidable. You’ll also learn about local ranches pioneering water-harvesting methods with agave that could reforest drought-challenged landscapes globally—because agave doesn’t just survive, it restores.

• Copal: The Bursera tree family’s resin has been burned in ceremony and purification for thousands of years across Mesoamerica. Its smoke is considered a living bridge between worlds, sacred to the Maya and present in nearly every indigenous tradition of this landscape.

We’ll also explore the common or overlooked—dandelions, bougainvillea, jacaranda, rose, jasmine, milkweed—the cobblestones, the nearby mountains with over 30 names. While typical tours cover human history, food, and churches, these walks reframe all encounters with a world that is animate, relational, and very much alive.

In multi-day versions, we’ll include a live Zoom session with Amazonian curanderos out of Iquitos, Peru. I’ll lay the groundwork, then hand it over to them to introduce their beliefs in their own words and answer your questions—live from the jungle.

 

How We Play

Group exercises are simple but powerful, a prompt, a little context, and a lot of freedom. 

• A cobblestone’s memoir: What has a 500-year-old volcanic stone witnessed? 

• Plant confessions: Group sharing, a nature encounter that blew your mind or changed you.

• Collective imagination: Brainstorming hyper imaginative ways to change empty lots, areas of underuse, crumbled foundations…

 

From past workshops:

• Giant Dandelion: "I’d build a massive paper maché dandelion—a monument to the things we notice when we slow down."

• Label Everything: "Let’s use a label maker to title everyday objects. Suddenly, the mundane becomes a museum."

• Bathroom Bouncer: "A velvet rope and a bouncer at the bathroom door—not to keep people out, but to make them question why they’re being let in."

 

Mediums: The walks draw on the full range of creative modes from my original class: sketchbooks, word pastiches, found object arrangements, on-site installations, stitch work and textiles, paintings, and anything except unedited cell phone shots, though even those can be collaged or turned into something else later. 

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What People Say

"I think jolting people off their predictable paths describes everything I did today." —Matt

"Today’s adventure was a mental disorder—and I mean that in the best way." —Elizabeth

"More striking to me than the actual sites we visited together was a thought I had on the drive home as we discussed our artistic ideas and favorite parts, it is so strange that just two days ago we were all practically strangers." —Tami

"The walk today was an eye-opener. I’ve explored this area numerous times, but I’ve never experienced it like this. As I become more aware of my surroundings, I’m becoming more aware of myself as a part of them." —Kori

"The questions that were left unanswered in the museum were probably the more shameful ones—and that’s where the real work began." —Amanda

 

Join Us

Living Studio School is for anyone who’s ever wondered if there’s more to the world than meets the eye. Whether you’re an artist, a writer, a scientist, or simply someone who feels the call to reconnect, these workshops will help you:

• Awaken your senses to the living world

• Create in response to what you encounter

• Build community with others on the same path

• Remember what it means to live in reciprocity with the earth

No prior experience in art or animism needed—just an open heart and a willingness to play.

 

Ready to see the world differently? Contact me to learn more or sign up for a workshop.

 

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