About ART
Our Team
We are a team of experienced and passionate facilitators, leaders, coaches, entrepreneurs, and volunteers dedicated to the practice of authentic relating and the production of authentic relating trainings. We’re committed to bringing about a world of healthy, conscious, connected, revealed, enlivened, and intimate relationships, with both self and others.
We live and breathe this work in our own lives, and have watched ourselves and each other radically transform toward greater and deeper connection with all those with whom we’re in relationship.
From breakthroughs in intimate partnerships to profound connections with absolute strangers (who rapidly become friends and allies), we’ve all seen how hugely impactful and immediately applicable this work and practice has been.
If you’re interested in working with ART in any creative capacity, get in touch with us anytime at [email protected]
Ryel Kestano
CO-FOUNDER / SENIOR COURSE LEADER
Ryel is the lead designer of ART’s curriculum, develops the company’s long-range growth strategy, and is a Senior Course Leader. Prior to co-founding ART International, Ryel oversaw all training operations at the Integral Center in Boulder, a world-renowned leader in transformational workshops. He has been a course leader, course supervisor, facilitator and coach since discovering authentic relating several years ago. Ryel is also the co-founder and visionary behind Virtuance, one of the largest providers of real estate photography in the world, and the co-founder and visionary behind Pink Mammoth, one of the Bay Area’s largest and most successful creative arts collectives. Ryel has four very authentic kids and lives in Boulder.
Jason Digges
CO-FOUNDER
Author of Conflict = Energy, The Transformative practice of Authentic Relating, Jason is a modern renaissance man. Equal parts artist, philosopher, teacher, and media producer, from 2003-2012 he worked for Integral Institute to create thousands of hours of educational media on the topics of transpersonal psychology, spirituality, productivity, and personal growth.
Obsessed with how humans can live and relate optimally, he’s facilitated groups and taught authentic relating and circling since 2012. Jason has led courses in over 20 cities around the world. www.jasondigges.com
Jamie Grant
DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS
Jamie manages ART’s operations, communications and administrative projects, focusing on the internal execution essential to the company’s big vision. Prior to joining the team, Jamie supported various nonprofit organizations dedicated to empowering individuals, families and communities through mentoring, education and employment training for nearly a decade. Her professional impact has since merged with her own personal transformation, having spent the past five years supporting the very teachers and programs that paved her way to a more authentic life. With a keen eye for the details and a big heart for this work, Jamie is on fire behind the scenes in Bellingham, Washington.
Dayna Seraye
Director of Leadership and Facilitator Training / senior COURSE LEADER
Dayna facilitates transformational experiences for groups and individuals through embodiment practices, therapeutic coaching, authentic relating and integrative healing arts. She has guided retreats, trainings and immersions for nearly two decades and has taught at renown festivals and conferences throughout the world. Her passion lies in supporting people to experience embodied connection – where healing occurs and wholeness is remembered, and is honored to serve ART as a course leader. Dayna is the Co-Founder and Director of Hanuman Academy, which offers soul-based yoga education. She is also the Creative Director for Hanuman Festival, and you can find her classes online through gaia.com and hanumanacademy.com.
NATASHA FIGUEROA HUSTED
Program Manager for Facilitator Training / Course Leader
Natasha is an instrumental part of the European leadership team, running all EU course operations and facilitating ART Level 1 courses throughout Europe. They have been on a path of Authentic Relating for over 20 years by integrating honesty practices, dance, tantra, shamanism, improvisation, and more. Their main passions are intimacy, communication, vulnerability, gender balancing, and love. As a person of mixed heritage and raised in multiple cultures, Natasha is focused on representation, accessibility and inclusivity in the self-development world. Based in beautiful Copenhagen. Read more here at https://www.jellyfishheart.com
Claire Dennis
course production manager
Claire works behind the scenes, managing the administrative activity to ensure all ART courses and offerings run smoothly. Previous to ART, Claire spent many years developing and managing volunteer programs for homelessness and environmental organizations in London, UK. An active volunteer herself for most of her life, projects have taken her across the world – supporting refugees in Europe, dancing with disadvantaged groups in India and farming/living regeneratively in Canada. Claire is captivated by the concept of community and has always been drawn to the diversity of life – learning about others and their unique perspectives. Working for ART is the perfect place to deepen this curiosity and support others to take this powerful practice out into the world.
Jocelyn Lee
Sales & Marketing Manager
Jocelyn cares deeply about making Authentic Relating visible and accessible to people who, like herself, really value human connection. She believes between every touch point from people, to groups, to organizations, to businesses, and the planet, we’re all trying to make contact with each other. What is meaningful to Jocelyn in this role is ensuring that we keep putting people’s connection needs first and that when we make this the focus, everything else falls into place. In the everyday, Jocelyn can be found in Copenhagen enjoying the ‘hygge’ life while dreaming of Vancouver, Canada where she’s from. While she loves putting her creative, strategic, and analytical mind to work – she considers herself an embodied mystic at heart and has a hard time being concise in describing herself fully.
DANIEL BROOKS
EU Regional Manager / SENIOR COURSE LEADER
Brooks considers himself a nerd at heart. Over the years, having originally been trained as a physicist, a soldier, and a zen monk, he now devotes his full nerdiness to the topic of human connection. In 2010 he discovered authentic relating and was immediately hooked on the vast potential of it, and has since made it an integral part of his personal and professional practice. He is engaged in community leadership with the Borderland, travels around the EU teaching authentic relating, lives in Copenhagen, and dislikes talking about himself in third person.
AUTUMN RAE
Social Media Coordinator
Autumn fulfills day-to-day activities and external communications as ART’s Communications Coordinator as well as curates content and grows our online community as the Social Media Manager. Prior to joining the ART team, Autumn was a second grade teacher. Her favorite educator book was and is The Power of Our Words by Paula Denton which provided excellent foreshadowing into what her future held. Through personal transformation and discovering authentic relating, Autumn is now a yoga teacher, love coach, and an integral part of the ART management team. Autumn found authentic relating while on retreat in Bali and immediately knew that she was in it for life. Joining the team at ART International was a natural next step! Autumn also enjoys dancing and optimizing her human experience through biohacking and mindfulness practices.
Rick Smith
senior COURSE LEADER
Rick has spoken to over 100,000 people on five continents in areas of teaching skills, public speaking, and facilitation. His best-selling book Conscious Classroom Management has now sold over a quarter million copies, and continues to touch the lives of teachers and their students. Throughout these past twenty years, in addition to training teachers, Rick has also been teaching workshops in consciousness, embodiment, personal growth, and meditation. He now brings his experience in teaching and facilitation to ART, offering practical ways for participants to know and love themselves, and remember their own innocence, wholeness, and “enough-ness,” especially in all the tight corners of their inner and outer worlds.
Christopher Gray
SENIOR COURSE LEADER
Christopher is a course leader of The ART of Being Human, Levels 1 & 2, as well as the Authentic Leadership Program (ALP). He’s spent 20 years in the software world as a leader in educational technology, most recently at Facebook. During that time, Christopher has also been doing extensive work supporting people struggling with alcoholism, substance abuse, and codependency. Since discovering and immersing himself in the practice of Authentic Relating, he’s transitioned to coaching and working with ART to bring this transformative, humanizing practice to the world. He teaches Bikram yoga, and, most importantly, is from New Jersey.
margo Fisher
COURSE LEADER
It brings Margo a lot of joy to connect with awareness and intuition, embodying what she’s learnt about communication and intimacy. She was a teacher and educational researcher for many years and continues to enjoy finding clear ways to share the revelation of authentic relating to those ready for it. Margo also spends time as a medicine guide and researcher into psychedelics for healing. She is a partner, mother to a teen daughter, friend and nature lover, living a slow and alive life near the forest just outside of London.
Sydney McGary
COURSE LEADER
KATE MIDDLETON
COURSE LEADER
Kate Middleton is a Somatic Therapist and Authentic Relating Facilitator on a mission to help humans feel alive and at home in their bodies, relationships and the world. As a former World Champion Freediver she blends Nature-based adventures with deep relational work to create environments where connection and healing can happen.
Kate leads groups and individuals into the depths of their bodies and their truth and helps them walk it into the world. When she is not in session you can find her running, climbing and reading poetry in the Eastern Sierras of California.
Ranjit Krishnamma
COURSE LEADER
Ranjit has 30 years experience of personal development; as a large group facilitator, trainer of facilitators and creator of unique experiential workshops. He is also a rock-climbing instructor, a professional actor, and leader of Circling and Authentic Relating group experiences. “I sometimes get the sense that we are already deeply connected and that this work helps us to rediscover…this.”
Drew Lawson
COURSE LEADER
Drew has worked and played at the intersection of ecology, well-being, and eros for all of his adult life. Drawing from teachings and practices that include rites of passage, martial arts, Sexological Bodywork, tantra hatha yoga and free-diving, Drew has been offering coaching and trainings in embodied well-being for the last 15 years. He has been a facilitator for ART International since Spring 2019, and currently lives in West London, UK.
Stephanie Dickinson
COURSE LEADER
Stephanie Dickinson is a feminine leadership mentor and connection expert on a mission to massively upgrade the relationship skills of millions worldwide. Her superpower is helping people increase their emotional intelligence, create rewarding relationships and find freedom and fulfilment in connection. When she isn’t shifting the mundane to magic with her work, you can find her dancing Bachata or on a waterfall adventure in Bali. She shares her work worldwide, in coaching programs, authentic relating trainings, festivals, retreats and men’s and women’s circles.
Keith McGuinnes
COURSE LEADER
Adriana Candeias, PHD
ART Leadership Institute Executive Director / Course Leader
