Jennifer Rudolph Walsh spent three decades as literary agent and board member at WME. She served as a midwife for thousands of stories that shaped what we believe is possible for ourselves and the world around us, including those of Sue Monk Kidd, Jeannette Walls, Brené Brown, Oprah Winfrey, Arianna Huffington, and Sheryl Sandberg. She created Together Live, a traveling storytelling tour, that crisscrossed North America and set fire to 50,000 souls. “Life-changing” was the most used word to describe the experience. She published an anthology of its speakers, HUNGRY HEARTS: Essays of Courage, Desire and Belonging. These books and tours ignited global conversations around resilience, purpose, and personal transformation, proving to her again and again that our stories have magic powers to heal and connect us.

Many of these stories are the same on the inside, even if they might look very different on the outside. The same stories and themes have appeared in every culture since the beginning of time—these myths, with their archetypes, reflect so many of our adventures and misadventures. Jennifer believes that we carry these stories in our DNA, that not only are they the backbone of our literary canon, but they are the scaffolding of all of our lives. She believes that knowing our myth and archetype can make sense of the past, present, and possibly predict the future. And, unlike your astrological sign or enneagram number, your mythological story can change as you gain new perspectives and make brave new choices. We revise our stories as we learn and grow.

Today she lives in Montecito with her husband, three dogs, 2 goats, 2 donkeys, a micro cow, and a flourishing organic farm. She calls the post-corporate period of life her “sacred pause” and is learning how to become a human being instead of a human doing. While her current myth is Atalanta – The Warrior, she is hoping to become more like Ariadne – The Guide as her archetype in the fullness of time. Guiding people to MythMatcher is the first step in that direction.

Ivy Mahsciao was a young immigrant child watching her own complicated myths unfold when she came to the US as a wide-eyed preteen. She spent her teenage years fumbling through life as Atalanta and other times Achilles with a spy twist because she loved and still loves spy movies. She had always wondered about her potential career as a professional spy growing up. [See Transformer]

That little spy who never was too shagged no matter how many twists and turns the plots came to be later spent her 20s and 30s burying her dream of becoming a spy. Having had an unusual upbringing, the theme and virtue of resilience stayed prominent in her life as she flipped her two decades too long of a creative agency and tech consulting career into an entrepreneurial awakening. After encountering a remarkably unique lineage of Tibetan Buddhist teachers, she began years of independent studies with this group of brilliant scholars and PhDs filling her every waking and yogic dreaming moment with the potentiality of neuroscience and psychotherapy. She sat on a meditation cushion every Thursday night and listened to 3-hr long lectures that she thought must be what the quantum field sounds like if it were spoken poetry outside of space and time. She was Neo or maybe Trinity slicing through the Matrix with her teachers, imagining that she could make herself The Chosen One. So yes, she took the red pill and dove heart first into the phenomenology of the mind-body system, psychology, mysticism, and what all that could mean for the next myth she would lead.

During COVID, she founded the social impact startup – evrmore – to help young people nurture their inner visions for themselves, to turn loneliness, isolation, and adversity into the alchemist’s gold for personal transformation. She’s deeply connected to the human experience that we all share as a collective, where no one is immune to disillusionment, separation, and painful losses in life. She believes the prima materia in these experiences that could determine if we sink or rise to the occasion, is the ability to adapt and have the know-how to keep pushing ourselves against the world in an enduring and meaningful way. That’s what she wants to spend her time thinking about, witnessing and experiencing all the archetypes that rise up to meet her as she rises up to meet other versions of these archetypes in the world.

And yes, she’s still very much an Atalanta, through and through.

Casey Coste is a student of the Mythological Studies with an emphasis in Depth Psychology MA program at Pacifica Graduate Institute. She currently holds undergraduate degrees in History, Global Studies (with a concentration of Asian Studies), and Greek & Roman Studies and has several undergraduate research publications under her name as well as acclaimed Honors in History and International Studies. You can often find her reading Joseph Campbell, C.G. Jung, James Hillman, Young Adult novels, myth retellings, and anime fanfictions. She also writes fantasy novels in her off time.

Her myth is Parzival – The Fool

Celebrated artist Ysabel LeMay has gained international recognition for her hyper-collage panoramas. She uses a process that combines photographs to create the real world remixed to paradisal perfection, so vividly realized that one feels drawn to step into her immersive tableaux.

Since winning the New York KiptonART Rising Stars Program, LeMay’s work has seen more than 135 exhibitions around the globe and has been acquired for the corporate collections of Chevron, Bloomingdale’s, and Bacardi, and the permanent collections at the Museum of Photographic Arts and the Morris Museum. In 2013, LeMay participated in the Texas Biennial, and in 2015, she represented Texas at the fourth edition of Women to Watch in Washington, D.C.  

In 2017, LeMay held a solo retrospective show at the Morris Museum in Morristown, New Jersey. In addition, she was commissioned by the U.S. Department of State’s Art in Embassies Program for the American Institute in Taiwan. She was a visiting instructor at the Santa Fe Photographic Workshop in New Mexico. Her work has been featured in several magazines and art books published by Rizzoli and Adobe and Apple chose her work to launch their new augmented reality AERO platform at their world press conference in New York.

While her technique is high-tech, LeMay’s hyper collage process is instinctual and organic, allowing each piece to dictate its destiny. From a single, simple starting point — an image, a color, an emotion — she follows a meticulous process. After first isolating and extracting elements of her photos, LeMay then weaves them together into intricate compositions of resplendent beauty.  LeMay has brought her hyper-collages to a place where they now serve as records of natural splendor perpetually in motion – as expressed by an artist who herself shows no interest in standing still.

Her myth is Sekhmet – The Protector

Bruno Cerboni is an Italian artist innovator, a modern version of the Italian Renaissance men he has considered as his own role models since his youth. An engineering graduate, industrial executive, and entrepreneur, he has been an active player in the fields of technological innovation over the past 30 years and has been awarded the National Innovation Award by the President of the Italian Republic and the Red Herring 100 Europe.

Among the leading experts in Web3, Blockchain, NFT, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality and Artificial Intelligence, a great lover of Art and Architecture, he has dedicated himself to researching new ways of approaching Art in the Third Millennium, investing in the creation of new digital brushes; and exclusive processes, which he called SMART-ART. He has participated in dozens of exhibitions in prestigious Art Galleries in Italy and abroad, in Venice (The State of Art at the Time of the 58th Venice Biennale), Rome, Milan, Zurich, Basel, Paris, Barcelona, Miami, India, and has made solo exhibitions, such as the solo show “Flora” in Mantua dedicated exclusively to the subject Flowers.

A great portraitist, as subjects he prefers the realization of life scenes, characteristic scenes of local customs, fashion and habits and portraits made in different styles. He started a project called “People of the World”; portraying people with characteristic costumes from all over the world. He was among the first to successfully publish his NFTs in 2021 first in Opensea, then in the curated platforms Makersplace, Foundation, and most recently on BinanceNFT and Ninfa. His NFTs and works can be viewed here.

With the help of recent Artificial Intelligence platforms, he has perfected his processes for creating artworks, reaching recognized levels of excellence, especially in the creation of characters and portraits.

His myth is Taroo – The Martyr

Kwame Scruggs was born and raised in Akron, Ohio—which, at that time, was the rubber capital of the world. He graduated from high school on a Thursday and started working as a mail boy at Goodyear the following Monday. He remained there for 15 years, nine as a drafter in Mold Design while attending the University of Akron in the evening. After juggling work and school for many years, Kwame decided to take a risk and jump. Accepting a buyout from Goodyear with no job in sight, he left on faith. He accepted a graduate assistantship at the University of Akron where he earned a MS degree in Technical Education with an emphasis in Guidance and Counseling.

After graduating he spent five years working with youth and adults in Pre-College programs at the university. During that time, he was introduced to the Akan System of Life Cycle Development (African-based rites of passage) and became formally initiated. Through this process, he discovered his purpose and reason for life. Soon after, he was introduced to the works of Carl G. Jung, Joseph Campbell, and Michael Meade. His further reading, and the experience of his own journey, solidified his belief in the power of myth to transform lives.

In 1998, Kwame went out on his own facilitating groups for high school dropouts and youth attending charter schools in Akron and Cleveland. Through the telling, discussion, and analysis of mythological stories, told to the beat of a djembe drum, Kwame supported each youth in becoming the hero in their own lives. To deepen his work, Kwame enrolled in Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara, California and obtained a masters and eventually a Ph.D. in Mythological Studies with an emphasis in Depth Psychology.

In 2003, Kwame founded and became Executive Director of the non-profit, Alchemy, Inc. Over the years, Alchemy, Inc. has been recognized for its bold, creative, and humane work.  In 2012, Alchemy won the President’s Committee National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Award, the nation’s highest honor for after-school and out-of-school programs. Kwame accepted this award from First Lady, Michelle Obama, at the White House. The work of Alchemy, Inc. was also the backdrop of the feature-length documentary, “Finding the Gold Within.” Since its inception, Alchemy has worked with 2000 youth. In 2020, the Association of Teaching Artists (with Lincoln Center Education) presented Kwame with their Innovation in Teaching Artistry award.

Kwame is a board member of the Joseph Campbell Foundation and a graduate of the National Guild Community Art Education’s CAELI (Community Arts Education Leadership Institute) Class of 2015 and a BMe Fellow (2017). Kwame has presented at numerous C.G. Jung sites around the country and is internationally known for his unique, engaging style and his innovative method of using myth to create community, stimulate dialogue, and inspire life-changing moments.

His myth is Atalanta – The Warrior