Elysa creates healing, designs products, champions learning, and fashions beauty. Applying the medicine of creativity to projects at the intersection of design, art, and education, she enables her students to thrive through mindful making and life prototyping.
Elysa was recently awarded the Edmund Hillary Global Impact Fellowship where she harnesses the world’s creativity to generate lasting change. She is the co-founder of Design Mystics, which helps leaders unleash their inner designer and change maker in pursuit of transformative change and innovation for self, family, organization, and community. As Google’s first designer-in-residence, she facilitated human-centered design processes, spearheaded social impact projects and built immersive art installations for transformation. Previously, Elysa worked at IDEO where she developed the Design Thinking for Educators platform. As founder of The Creative Nomad Project, she led global organizations to foster creativity in endeavors ranging from transforming Peruvian artisans into entrepreneurs, to visioning the future of K12 education in rural Panama. At her core, she’s an artist who’s happiest when getting lost in the color and texture of fabric and sculpting precious metals. These days Elysa can be found playing with fiber and fire in her studio Good Guild through which she offers works of healing art. She also teaches at the Stanford d.school.
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