The Team
LAURIE PHILLIPS
Co-founder and Executive Director
Laurie loves helping people find insights into their personal challenges and opportunities through dialoging with museum art. As an award-winning artist/designer, life coach and leadership trainer for over 25 years, Laurie asks the question, "what's it like to be you?" Besides working in major museums on the east and west coasts, she's led workshops at Mayo Clinic, Mayo Medical School, Medtronic, Target Corporation, Adler School of Coaching, Children's Hospital Minneapolis, National Alliance on Mental Illness, St. Paul’s Monastery, Minnesota Jung Association, New England Museum Association, and the American Alliance of Museums. She’s a contributing writer for the forthcoming book, "An Empathy-Building Toolkit for Museums," edited by Elif Gokcigdem, PhD, published in 2025 by the American Alliance of Museums.
RACHEL ROPEIK
Museum Sage Guide
Rachel is a museum educator and museum adventurer who brings thoughtful, playful, and progressive approaches to catalyzing change in arts and culture. She believes that art can be the spark for deep personal and communal realizations, and she loves coming to Museum Sage sessions with her coaching/facilitation hat on and her art historian hat off. Professionally, she has been the Learning Director at the Aspen Art Museum in Colorado, the Senior Manager of Public Engagement at New York City's Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and other museum roles at the Brooklyn Museum, MoMA, and the Met in NYC; and Dulwich Picture Gallery and The Courtauld Gallery in London. Personally, she's a dancer, a baker, a veteran of many different hair colors, and forever fascinated by pirates. In all of her life and work, she embraces experimentation, creativity, and equity.
KIMBERLEY ELLIOTT
Museum Sage Guide
“Be well inside, so you can be well in community — and bring your wonderfully, weird self to your leadership.” Kimberley is a firm believer that personal evolution happens from the inside out. That there isn’t a one and done formula for Leadership Wellness™ because every human being is brilliantly unique. Her collaboration with soulful leaders is rooted in a body centered approach, blending mind-body practices, creativity and coaching to support her clients in developing resilience, embodying purpose, and empowering conscious impact. Kimberley loves how the Museum Sage experience calls forth inner wisdom and invites a playful way to bring creativity into the equation of self-development. She holds an M.L.A. in Creation Spirituality, a Bachelor of Arts degree, and is Certified by the prestigious Co-Active® Training Institute (CTI), the International Coaching Federation (ICF) and The Center for Mind Body Medicine.
JADAH GREEN
Museum Sage Guide
Jadah, owner of Epiphany House, is an alternative health care practitioner. She is dedicated to deep listening, seeking beauty and understanding, and being a respectful witness to those she journeys with. She loves the Museum Sage experience as it magically combines her love for museums, art history, and the ancient practice of making meaning through pictures and symbols. She is a student of the enneagram and the tarot. Jadah has a BFA in photography. She is a certified Spiritual Healer through the Arvigo Institute, a Reiki Master of the Usui/Holy Fire method, and a certified spiritual guide through Wisdom Ways Center for Spirituality.
FRANCESCA GANGI
Museum Sage Guide
Francesca has been a yoga & meditation teacher, body worker, and energy worker for 20 years. She supports self-directed mental, physical, and emotional health for her clients. She’s also a professional artist and crafter. With a BS in Arts and Letters she’s crafted an interdisciplinary path investigating the history of human artistic culture through the intersection of religious practices and science, with a minor in conflict resolution and facilitation. Francesca is fascinated with how people see themselves and the world and the different filters that impact knowledge of the self. She stumbled onto Museum Sage® while listening to a podcast about museum curation. She loved the idea so much she paused the podcast and emailed Laurie immediately. As a trained Guide, she finds joy and awe in watching a Sage unfold their own thoughts and feelings through conversation with themselves and the members of their group.
JON SPAYDE
Co-Founder and Director of Publications and Curiosity
Jon came up with the basic idea of Museum Sage® while visiting the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis with Laurie Phillips. In addition to writing fiction and poetry and performing one-person stage shows, he’s a journalist with 35 years of experience writing about art, spirituality, psychology, and personal growth for many publications and organizations, including Art in America, ID Design, Utne Reader, Public Art Review, Experience Life, American Craft, the Whitney Museum, and ArtPlace America. His book How to Believe was published by Random House in 2008. He studied East Asian languages at Harvard and, briefly, comparative literature at Stanford, before flunking out and embracing journalism.
KAREN OLSON
Director of Training and Synchronicity
Karen is a coach, workshop leader, writer and editor who helps people create more elemental, artful lives and a more peaceful, healthy world. Since she was in a flood, a tornado, an explosion in a cave, and lost at sea, Karen has been fascinated with elemental and energetic balance and has studied permaculture, holistic health, tarot, feng shui, and leadership development. Karen is the executive editor of American Craft magazine and was formerly editor-in-chief of Public Art Review, which covers international art in the public realm, and Utne Reader. She holds an M.F.A. in creative writing and a B.A. in art history and literature, and writes about art, culture, the environment, health, home, food, and spirituality for numerous publications. She also coaches people who want to live freely as their most natural, powerful selves, develop resilience, and turn their big ideas into real-world impact.