Wellness Programs for
Arts Organizations
designed for the specific realities of the creative life
What is Wellness for the creative?
Artists, musicians, makers, performers and creative entrepreneurs carry the weight of their craft alongside the unique pressures of sustaining their creativity. The conditions of a creative life (financial uncertainty, performance pressure, the gap between vision and output, the grief of abandoned or failed work, the relentlessness of self-exposure) don't just affect mental health. They affect the body, health, financial achievement, and ultimately the capacity to continue to create at all.
Built for organizations that hold creative communities
Music Organizations
Nonprofits, foundations, and initiatives supporting musicians, performers, and music industry professionals — including touring artists and crew.
Craft & Visual Arts Organizations
Nonprofits, foundations, and initiatives supporting musicians, performers, and music industry professionals — including touring artists and crew.
Literary & Writing Communities
Companies, collectives, and nonprofits working with dancers, theatre makers, filmmakers, and the full range of performing and screen-based artists.
Film & Performing Arts
Companies, collectives, and nonprofits working with dancers, theatre makers, filmmakers, and the full range of performing and screen-based artists.
Universities and Arts Programs
Conservatories, art schools, and university arts departments seeking wellness programming for students navigating the transition into a professional creative life.
Fellowship & Grant Programs
Foundations and funders whose grantees and fellows need more support, they need the internal capacity to sustain their vision over time.
About Me
I'm Mariana, a professional singer-songwriter and interdisciplinary artist for over twenty years, and this work found me out of necessity to keep creating. For years, I've lived and studied at the meeting point of creativity, the healing arts, the body, and what it takes to keep making things when life keeps asking for more than you feel you have to give.
My creative life, of songwriting, band leadership, recording studios, visual arts, and the relentless demand to be visible and promote one’s work, coupled with decades of many of life’s most intense stressors, is what led me to understanding more about the creative process itself in relationship to our body’s need for safety and security. I was disappearing as a creative person from creative burnout, creative disappointments, and the constant overwhelm of being both an artist and a creative entrepreneur. My well-being was suffering, and I deeply wanted to bridge being a creative person with a life I felt was healthy and supportive of me.
My path has led me to become a Master Wellness Coach, somatic practitioner, mindfulness educator, and creative facilitator. These were the tools that helped me renew my creative spirit and value my wellbeing as a creative person through a deeper, more empowered lens.
What I bring isn't a collection of techniques, though. It's a deep conviction that creativity is not a talent. It's a relational capacity with oneself and the world. One that needs safety, self-compassion, multiple levels of support, community, and much more understanding about how creative people live, work and make their work.
Offerings for Arts Organizations
Key Note Talks, Workshops, Residencies
A keynote on why creative wellness requires its own model.
The wellness frameworks most organizations reach for were built for a different kind of human in a different kind of life. When we apply them wholesale to artists (to people whose livelihood, identity, nervous system, and sense of meaning are all bound up in a single act of creation), we get programs that feel beside the point. Because they are.
This talk makes the case for something different: a holistic wellness model built from the ground up around the specific realities of creative life. The financial precarity. The performance exposure. The identity entanglement. The grief of abandoned work. The relentless gap between vision and output. The body that holds all of it.
Drawing on somatic practice, nervous system science, mindfulness research, and 20 years inside the creative process as a performing artist, this keynote offers both artists and the organizations that support them a new language and a new starting point. Audiences leave not just informed, but reoriented.
Format 45–60 minutes + Q&A | In person or remote
Best for Arts conferences, online and in-person creative organizations, festival keynotes, and foundations.
Nervous system tools for the creative life.
Performing, exhibiting, submitting, sustaining (the creative life is one long activation of the threat response.) This workshop introduces artists to their own autonomic nervous system: how it works, why it contracts under pressure, and what it actually takes to move from survival into creative availability.
Grounded in somatic practice and Polyvagal theory this is not a stress management workshop. It's a reckoning with the biology of creative life and a practical path toward working from a different relationship to the body as artists.
Format Single workshop (2–3 hrs) or half-day | In person or remote
Best for Music organizations, performing arts companies, fine arts schools, fellowship programs, BFA and MFA programs.
A multi-session wellness residency for arts organizations.
For organizations ready to move beyond a single workshop and into lasting change. Over the course of several sessions — shaped collaboratively around your community's specific needs — we build a shared language and practice around creative sustainability and the internal conditions that make long-term creative work possible.
The sessions are designed around the needs of your community, creating something that belongs to your organization long after our work together ends.
Format: Multi-session series (typically 6–12 sessions) with ongoing organizational partnership
Best for Music organizations, visual arts centers, conservatories, writing centers, foundations and fellowships with multi-year artist relationships
A somatic and mindfulness workshop on what's actually stopping your creative work.
Imposter syndrome. Perfectionism. Procrastination. We treat these as character flaws or creative problems to think our way out of. They're not. They're patterns (behavioural, neurological, and deeply embodied) that form in response to real experience and real threat.
This workshop looks honestly at what creative blocks are made of: the nervous system states that make starting feel dangerous, the perfectionism that protects against exposure, and the identity stories that calcify into habit. Using mindfulness practices drawn from MBSR, Polyvagal-informed somatic awareness, and the behavioural science of habit formation, participants move from self-diagnosis to something more useful: a practical, body-based understanding of how their patterns formed, and what it actually takes to shift them.
The goal isn't to eliminate the inner critic. It's to stop letting it make the decisions.
Format: Single workshop (2–3 hrs) or half-day | In person or remote
Best for Artist residencies, MFA programs, conservatories, organizations, writing communities, and creative cohorts.
