You are at a creative crossroads.
I empower artists to find their voice, avoid stagnation and bring ideas to life.
A crossroads is an indicator, it is the point, the place, the juncture, the intersection before growth happens and impactful change occurs.
It is a gorgeous and windy space to step into.
It is transformative.
I architect custom creative engagement and guidance that is engineered to support your growth, discovery and exploration in the pursuit of what matters most to you creatively. Not only for your process and exploration, but for building your work from the ideas up.
As makers and doers we all need support, guidance and many flexible maps.
You’re at the Crossroads…
- with beginning or finishing a project
- with how to identify your next steps for creative action
- of stretching and flexing your ideas
- with working in a vacuum, needing comprehensive creative support
- with establishing new patterns and engagement for the conditions that support your creative work with building an idea into a project
- of feeling directionless
- with translating ideas into generative material
- of finding & companioning with your unique voice
- with fatigue around feeling defeated and stuck
- with a yearning with igniting fresh wonder and robust creativity
You are a seeker, hungry to create impactful growth.
You know the value of process and examination. You are craving new creative protocols to lead you forward, to immerse you in exploration and discovery. You are looking for guidance, comprehensive and nuanced feedback that is aligned with your heart and vision. You have a desire to expand, deepening your practice and processes to create what matters most to you.
I’ll just say that there is no one else I know who does this work like she does; backed by an overwhelming history of experience, achievement, and research.
Working with Darla for this year, has been so freeing creatively, instructive mentally and essential physically, making me a more authentic, centered, and confident artist. I was in the studio painting last week in an absolutely different headspace. no critic.It was revolutionary and curious and kind. Now when challenged I don’t doubt my skill or vision, I step back, I question, I problem solve. I allow for learning and experimentation.
Darla helps me question myself. Stay true to myself. She helps me point my energy in alignment with my ideas. I can’t say enough to recommend her to you if you want a surer creative footing for your practice.
Sometimes all we need is to be given the tools, or just a gentle nudge, to enter the process differently. I have always marveled at Darla’s way of looking at, and seeing into and through things. I envy the clarity of that seeing, but also her succinct articulation of what is not seen. As a maker, performer, director, educator, writer and creative coach, Darla brings a broad spectrum of gifts that adds tremendously to any creative process.
For the work that you make & the creative human you are.
To be seen, heard and understood is life changing and life giving.
Incredible how we devise techniques and systems for navigation and expression.
We make meaning, we make worlds.
And for me that was learning — a lighthouse, a home, a miraculous space of ongoing transformation.
What Sets Darla Apart.
Highlights of my experience include a Guggenhiem Fellowship, an Interdisciplinary Research Fellowship at MacDowell along with numerable grants, residencies and exhibitions.
My professional trajectory is marked by a history of deep artistic practice with visual art, dance, performance, directing, devising theatre, music and writing as single disciplines and as interdisciplinary practice.
As an educator, I have cultivated safe and vibrant creative environments for emerging and seasoned artists to invent and build their deepest work and self.
I place an unwavering value to learning you in context – for the work you make, the creative human you are and how you care for your instrument. This ensures that creative support and guidance is a reflection of your vision and needs, providing clarity and direction in the pursuit of growth and creative action.
In addition to honing into singular concentration to these areas, I also focus on their interrelatedness, they are in fact intrinsically connected. Often times we learn, work and live in very compartmentalized ways which can leave us feeling more exhausted and divided, which may limit or partition growth and well being — diminishing the space and vitality we need for what we make and how we work and live. Creating alignment and highlighting connection enables a synchronous sustainability – one voice – through all you do and make.
how this work supports you.
Confident Creative Action
Trust your impulses and intuition and purposely and joyfully engage in an ever evolving creative practice. Learn past imposter syndrome, free creative paralysis from over thinking, negative rumination and an unruly inner critic. Increase dexterity to pivot and iterate new ideas, begin new projects and see them through, forge into new territories, acquire new competencies by broadening your creative arsenal and increasing adaptive skills.
Robust Idea Building
Learn how to mine, connect and build what you generate. Engage in diverse inspiration from a wide range of influences. Utilize creative problem solving to generate and refine ideas, Translate effective brainstorming into strategic action and build a repository of ideas. Jockey ideas across disciplines to expand boundaries and discovery. Learn how to mine, connect and build what you generate.
Revive Your Creative Heartbeat
To unlock doors to innovation and fresh wonder, to support embodied focus to get you back to self discovery and back to your work. Immerse in enlivened and joyful consistent creative engagement. Experience inspired renewal and engagement with an immersion in exploratory exercises, dynamic exploration, investigations, prompts and creative research to activate and inspire you.
Constant Growth Through Consistent Feedback
Maintain a sustainable creative momentum. Receive encouragement and motivation through deeply experienced and nuanced support. Utilize feedback as an innovation catalyst and be guided through a personal growth trajectory that’s aligned and tailored to what’s meaningful to your vision and aspirations. A feedback loop is a powerful tool to accelerate learning and deepening insights, identifying and targeting specific areas for development and growth. Continuous supports expands each iteration. Use feedback as a material, as a compass to adjust your trajectory and align your work.
Build an Idea into a Project
Cultivate creative flexibility and adaptability by encouraging your ideas to reconstitute and evolve. Create a conceptual foundation to ensure a solid mapping and navigation to guide and inform the idea building process. Experience strategic planning to break down creative action, work with custom prompts, exercises, creative propositions and inquiry to systematically transform ideas and generate material, embracing iterative development for continuous refinement and expansion as you progress through the process. Incorporate iterative feedback to increase momentum and utilize plural perspectives to create space for discovery and idea development. Expand confidence with creative risks by recognizing that innovation is charted in exploring uncharted territories.
Increase Creative Agility
Develop the dexterity to pivot and volley ideas, deepen active listening skills. Design inquiry to activate and generate material. Increase staying power in the studio, acquire resolution agility, Increase compassion to partner with uncertainty, identify pathways to deepen and expand your work. Convert challenges into creative opportunities. Fulfill specific goals and objectives meaningfully propelling individual and collective creative development. Create an environment that encourages open communication and aligned expression.
Cultivating Your Voice
Cultivate your unique identity, discover the power of aligned expression to communicate your ideas, learn what is truly meaningful for you. Embrace and foster your individuality over comparison of others, companion with your creative voice as a trusted collaborator, embrace your own perspectives and innovation. Lead with a grounded sense of your own north star.
develop a sustainable work practice
Redefine productivity metrics by aligning them to your personal needs and creative goals, recognizing that success in your work is not solely measured by conventional standards but by the meaningful progress you experience. Re-thinking time constraints allow for flexible and adaptable schedules that support and accommodate the dynamic nature of your creative process. Reclaim time and attention and develop a personal workflow that gives energy over diminished energy, ensuring focused uninterrupted creative sessions while nurturing the capacity for rest and rejuvenation.
taking care of you
Body Work means so many different things to so many different bodies. To be strong, to be flexible, to be agile, to be still, to be calm, to be balanced, to be powerful. To be well.
Let’s highlight the intrinsic connection between physical, cognitive vitality, and increased mindfulness, by building flexibility, increasing mobility and regulating your nervous system to deepen focus and endurance, strengthen and ground emotional bandwidth to navigate the highs and lows inherent to the creative process. Benefit from a more buoyant and sustained creativity and support cognitive processing to facilitate swift resolutions to challenges and decrease stressors that may be diminishing accessibility to your creative process.
Darla’s ability to cultivate and foster a space that is innovative within multifaceted realms of creativity is remarkable. Her ability to authenticate the work radiates and brightens the mind. Her zealous spirit, and tenacity to all aspects, integrative to a rich and mindfully crafted approach is amazing. Beautifully articulated within her work, is her ability to innovate, rejuvenate and expand understanding beyond horizons to the wonderful place of the heart.
I have collaborated with Darla in the realms of Body Work and mindfulness for more than a decade. Thanks to her guidance and expertise, I have learned foundational practices that have helped me perform at my best as an artist and a professional.
Darla’s intent focus on the individual sets her apart from other practitioners and coaches. From the start, she makes a real investment in understanding you as a unique human — your goals and needs, your concerns, everything about where you are and where you’d like to be.
Drawing from her extensive library of tools and practices, Darla designs programs for you, and only you. There is never a one-size-fits-all approach. As your collaboration progresses, Darla will tune your practice in response to your feedback, experiences and results. Always with kindness, never with judgment. Whatever happens along the way — personally, professionally, artistically — Darla listens and rolls with you. She is far more than a coach. Darla is genuinely a collaborator and partner in achieving your goals.
let's get started
1: Schedule Your Creative Strategy Session HERE.
I’ll respond via email with a few questions that will prime our conversation.
Your responses inform and give context to this session.
During this 20 minute Zoom call we’ll dive into your questions, challenges and identify creative action that will support you where you are.
2: Creative Strategy Session Follow Up
After our Creativity Strategy Session, I’ll send recommendations and a proposed schema for how we’ll work together. Your needs and desires set the tone and criteria for the scope of our work. I’ll create a framework that aligns best with you.
This can look like a handful of sessions, an intensive immersion, ongoing or a custom mobile residency designed just for you.
3: How We Connect & Interact
Sessions take place over Zoom, however a majority of the work takes place outside of session. You’ll receive “response materials” via email including notes, prompts, inquiry, resource materials that we’ll consistently volley with. This interaction is crucial for momentum and provides alternative space to learn, think and make. This process is essential to our working together.
Materials are specific to you and your needs. At base you’ll need a computer, Zoom and a notebook.
Great Expectations
During our first session we start our creative research together, where we unpack and expand the map for entry points and intel, identify “containers” of work and propose how to deepen, enliven and expand them. We’ll prioritize and sequence next steps.
In addition to our session time, ongoing email volley is instrumental for growth and forward facing momentum. I send follow up take away notes, post-game prompts and propositions to further develop, deepen and evolve the work.
I have worked with painters, performers, photographers, actors, writers, scenic artists, dancers, singers, choreographers and interdisciplinary creative humans. These descriptors are indicators and in no way are meant to define you.
The only pre-requisite is that you strive to climb, learn differently and seek to deepen your practice. You value process and examination and are open to conceptual and exploratory approaches to animate and activate your work.
Conventional methods, modes and lenses are also at the ready.
I’ll guide you to create what you make with rigor, fresh wonder, compassion, and gentle precision.
It’s often difficult to seek out guidance when you don’t quite know what you are seeking.
In our first session, I didn’t know what questions to ask or which areas of my craft to explore. Nonetheless, you met me where I was at. You prompted conversation that helped curate new and specific questions. From these questions, we spent time exploring/imagining the broader strokes, as well as penning in the finer details.
Tangibly, we developed actionable inventories for my work in performance, visual work, and research/development, all while working to consolidate the space between my everyday work and the work that I’ve imagined for myself.
The separation between my “creative life” and my “everyday life” was removed. The gap between the artist that I see myself as and the artist that I want to become has diminished.
I am an educator and a maker. This can be thrilling work.
It is also lonely and draining. The highs and lows can decenter me.
When I am with Darla I become a learner and collaborator. Her deep, care-filled listening, and clear, concrete guidance re-connects me to my deepest sources of energy and creativity.
Her wisdom is lived, refined by deliberation and study, and clarified by the joys released and metabolized through action. While my work can feel solitary work, Darla is there as collaborater, companion and witness.
Creative Strategy Session
Grab a 20 minute Zoom call, my treat.
Identifying challenges, solutions and creative action.
Expansion creates it’s own momentum.
DARLA VILLANI NYC
Artist, Creative Coach & Collaborator
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