Mariana Tirsa Kurko has spent over two decades living the creative life — as a professional singer-songwriter and recording artist, she knows firsthand what it means to build an identity around making things, and what it costs when the conditions to make them aren't there.

That lived experience — of stages, studios, performance anxiety, and the relentless pressure to show up creatively on demand — didn't just shape her artistry. It became the foundation of her work. When her own body began signaling what her mind had learned to override, she turned toward the science and practice of nervous system regulation, trauma-informed creative facilitation, mindfulness, and motivational behavioral science. Not as a departure from the arts, but as a deeper return to them.

Today, Mariana works with artists, performers, and arts organizations to build the internal and structural conditions that allow creativity to thrive — not just in moments of inspiration, but sustainably, over a career and a lifetime. She brings a practitioner's eye to the real challenges facing the creative sector: performance anxiety, burnout, perfectionism, creative inhibition, grief over professional loss, and the particular exhaustion that comes from being asked to innovate endlessly in systems that were never designed to support the humans doing the creating.

Her approach draws on somatic regulation, mindfulness practice, structured creative process, grief and transition work, and motivational interviewing — woven together not as a checklist of techniques, but as a coherent, embodied framework for developing creative resilience from the inside out.

She is the founder of Mariana Tirsa — Somatic Wellness for the Arts, and brings over a decade of experience in embodied practice and creative facilitation to her work with organizations across the performing arts, visual arts, and film and television industries.

Mariana splits her time between Mexico and the United States.