Author & Artist
Susie Herrick
With over 20 years experience as a psychotherapist in private practice, personality typology expert, department chair as well as professor who has coached and mentored over two thousand graduate students to become successful therapists themselves, Susie Herrick excels at finding the balance between one’s self—in introspection and self-transformation—with understanding the others in our lives. Many of her students and clients rave about the kind, incisive, and intuitive feel Susie has for those who are yearning to grow and learn about themselves and to learn about the others in their lives.
Uniquely, Susie grew up in a transformative spiritual and activist-based community leading workshops from a young age, with examples of strong women leaders in spirit, ceremony, and one-on-one. Susie has worked with female teachers in Tibet, with leaders in domestic violence, in academia, teaching mediation skills and the Enneagram, including at Stanford Law School, the Stanford Haas Center for Public Service, the United States Postal Service, the State of California, the Monterey Institute for International Studies, and many other institutions, including the Santa Clara and San Mateo County Jails and San Quentin State Prison.
In roles as varied as clinician, speaker, trainer, and management consultant Susie has also worked at high-tech and other large corporations. Additionally, she has worked on issues such as nuclear war prevention with Helen Caldicott, on peace, environmental, and educational activism and outreach, and has appeared twice in university-sponsored productions of The Vagina Monologues. Susie's memoir titled Aphrodite Emerges: The Journey That Changed My Life—and Changed My Father's Too describes how she transformed sexist and misogynist tendencies in her own family of origin by recognizing these patterns and changing herself.
Susie is a lover of the human story and spends her life learning to listen and invariably enjoys transmitting that love to others, by helping them love and relate to one another more compatibly.
Elle Luna
Elle Luna is a multidisciplinary artist, designer, and author.
She began her career as a designer at IDEO, where she spent five years honing her visual storytelling craft. Since leaving IDEO, Elle worked with a number of startups, including Uber, Medium, and Mailbox. While building Mailbox, Elle began to have a recurring dream about a white room. Of this experience, she writes:
“The room had tall white walls, warehouse windows, and concrete floors. I would visit this room and be filled with the most unbelievable sense of peace and calm. The morning Mailbox launched, I had a surreal experience where I understood that while building the company was one of the highlights of my life, I couldn’t understand what it had to do with my dream of a white room. The moment felt like I was standing at the crossroads of Should and Must. I quit my job two weeks later in search of this white room—literally—and I found it, an apartment for rent in San Francisco. On my first night there I awaited peace, but all I found was confusion and fear. And so I asked the room, ‘Why am I here?’ And the room replied, saying—‘It’s time to paint.’” With that, Elle returned to her lifelong love—making art.
Influenced by the work of Maira Kalman, Keith Haring, Mayumi Oda, and Agnes Martin, Elle has long been inspired by art making as a process of self-reflection and transformation. More of her thoughts and paintings on the subject can be found in her book, The Crossroads of Should and Must: Find and Follow Your Passion.
While Elle feels grateful to have participated in many innovative and entrepreneurial endeavors throughout her life, she believes that the creation of a new world where the feminine and masculine are in balance, a partnership of equals, might be the most innovative and creative act she has been a part of yet.
Elle lives on Instagram and Twitter—at @elleluna—and near the water in San Francisco, a perk that her cocker spaniel Tilly is especially excited about.