MY STORY
Mari Sierra is a multi-dimensional woman from Mexico city bringing heartfelt presence, wellbeing expertise and farsightedness to the cultural creative sectors.
As an experience designer she has 12+years of strategic practice helping companies and organizations bring critical thinking and brand strategy to build more meaningful products through collaborative innovation.
As an integral design practitioner, she strives to create change at the individual and collective level, by providing inspiration with her multi-media creations on conscious lifestyle, supporting leaders with heart-centric creative and strategic services and catalyzing multi-disciplinary collaborations that advance new paradigm businesses forward.
As a teaching artist, she’s the founder of Sierra y Mar, a creative laboratory that designs learning/healing journeys that promote shifts in culture through embodiment, conscious living and insightful creativity.
Her retreats and workshops are multi-sensory, immersive rituals that integrate disciplines to heal the body-mind, transform unconscious patterns and uncover new futures dormant within. She has hosted creative and wellness-based experiences for conscious creatives in San Francisco, Berlin, Basel, Brazil, Bali, Zurich, Hawaii and Mexico, witnessing the transformative power of practicing Stillness & Flow. Visit the photo-stories from past retreats.
As a global citizen, she's lived as a nomad for 2 years and creates soundscapes from her field recordings to accompany the soul with curated sound collages. She is currently based between in Mexico city, exploring the transformative effects of movement, sound and performance art. Her desire is to accompany the human soul with learning experiences and inspiring multi-media to bring insightful hope in this times of complex change.
Mari holds an MBA in Design Strategy, an International Business degree, a Yoga Instructor and Somatic Psychology Certificate and has recently adventured into training in contemporary dance, choreography and performance art. She is always in process of re-defining her craft and follows her curiosity fearlessly.
Mari is a creative entrepreneur by occupation, an embodiment teacher by profession, a design-futurist by education, a mystic by orientation, a generalist by essence and a cultural curator by hobby.
* "Mari is an extraordinary creator. She uses her design thinking training and skill to create possibilities that no one else could. She jumps straight to the deepest questions--and she listens, carefully, quietly, while you find the answers for yourself." Mike P.
* "La Mar Yoga Retreat was incredibly transformative... to a level that was such a unique and pivotal life experience." Verna B.
*"I'm always impressed by her ability to harmonize matters of the heart and body with that of the head - theoretical concepts. As a Mexican woman she balances a mezo-american connection to the earth with a unique ability to embrace and communicate elemental truths to a technology-obsessed western world via alchemical combinations of dance, yoga and experiential travel - reminding people that they too are nature.” Daniel Johnson
SHORT BIO
Traits: Creative Storyteller / Critical Systems Thinker / Enthusiast
Strengths: Presence, Empathy, Foresight
Enneagram: 478, Individualist, Optimist, Challenger
Mari Sierra helps people and teams find clarity and ways to improve what they’re designing. She facilitates collaborative design sessions to bring forth new paradigm business integrating systems thinking + human centered design. As a movement and meditation teacher immersed in the digital world, she’s passionate about the future of technology and the impact that has, and will have in our minds and bodies. Founder of Sierra y Mar, she designs experiential travel learning journeys across the globe to spark leadership, embodiment & multicultural immersions. She currently lives in between Mexico city and Berlin.
other musings
You can download the LA MAR Book here, to see a sample of the retreat activities.
In 2013, I co-founded Metapattern, a multi-disciplinary creative studio that helps humanistic technology startups communicate their visions and engage with their customers more meaningfully. In 2014, I joined Wisdom Hackers as a steward to bring philosophical inquiry to our digital lives. I’m part of a Human Agency, a collective of systems thinkers and doers creating conditions where individuals can transform the status quo.
The Future of Embodied Design
Mar Sierra is an experience designer & creative facilitator who works in the intersection of design, wellbeing and cultural shifts. She has been collaborating with various institutions, from Fortune 500 companies, startups, designers, authors and visionaries from her Sierra y Mar experience design firm. She frequently teaches workshops and hosts transformational retreats, and speaks about the art of living a healthy and well-examined life.
Trained as a systems thinker, yoga teacher and social designer, Mari graduated from an MBA in Design Strategy from the California College of the Arts in 2013. Through collaborations, Mari develops transformational learnings programs for multi-cultural audiences. Her integral lens promotes cultural shifts: solutions that help humans connect, become more aware, stimulate learning and imagination, and have an active healthy lifestyle.
With an interest in processes and visually elegant solutions, Mari’s collaborations range from developing creative concepts, strategic research methods, digital interfaces, talent curator, network building, to workshop facilitation and leadership education; aspiring to use Design as a tool that propels us toward a more embodied future.