~ A.O.B Founder ~
Melanie
Melanie is a multidisciplinary Artist with over seven years of professional experience in Arts Facilitation. Spanning from arts education settings, health and wellbeing, and working for a high end arts company, teaching in venues such as The Barbican. She has experience, both personally and professionally, of the power of the arts for healing and transformation, and creates an environment that ignites this boundless, creative medicine that lays within us all.
My Story
Hello! And thank you for being here!
I'm Melanie: arts facilitator, artist, musician, human being. I have much experience of the power of the arts for healing and transformation, and create an environment that ignites this boundless, creative medicine that lays within us all.
My work spans across many forms, environments and people. Including children’s hospitals, art studio’s, care homes, SEN/D and young offenders institutions. Helping to develop high levels of technical skills, transforming mental health and behavioural issues, and everything in between. Sometimes just simply (yet profoundly), encouraging lives to be a little better than they were before.
I am grateful to be able to connect with the full spectrum of ages, needs and unique personalities. I have worked alongside medical teams and art therapists at Great Ormond Street Hospital, utilising creative expression to help children with terminal illnesses process their experiences, and channel emotions. I have facilitated workshops for teenagers from young offenders institutions, helping them to adopt responsibility and find their passion, by tapping into what positive change in the world matters to them, and creating art that reflects that. I have worked with 90+ year olds with dementia, calming their emotions and improving focus and memory through song learning and drawing. In addition to this, for the past four years I have led events across London for a high end arts company, teaching in venues such as The Barbican. As well as this, I have helped tutor students to gain entry into various prestigious art schools, such as the BRIT school, and to gain art scholarships at private schools across London.
I have fused together the vast array of experiences from working with children and the elderly in these therapeutic settings, with my time teaching visual art to adults and children professionally, to forge a creative education for all, that I truly believe in.
The 'Art of Being School' is a philosophy, a mode of healing, and an invitation to live your truest, highest self.
We very much look forward to creating with you soon!
With love,
Melanie
LOVE
EXPRESSION
FREEDOM
TRUTH
HEALING
We are the Art of Being. We believe in activating unique soul expression; facilitating an environment which brings forth each person's highest potential. Our Core Values are LOVE, EXPRESSION, FREEDOM, TRUTH and HEALING. These five tenants help guide everything we do, dissolving the student/ teacher boundary, and facilitating an environment where everyone is learning and transforming, striving for the highest possible good both individually, and as a collective.
Art is the way you speak, move, breathe, listen. There is an Art to everything. Being (existing) and being a 'human being' is an art, in that through expression, conversations and meditation we can become better at life, better at 'being'.
We believe that this philosophy can change the world, one incredible mind at a time.
We are the Art of Being.