The Story
fine art photographer · yogi · eco-spiritualist wellness practitioner
The Journey To Now...The Path That Made The Practice
Before ceremony and devotion, there was simply survival.
For fifteen years I worked in disaster response with international airlines, major hotel brands and US government agencies. I helped organizations plan for worst case scenarios and build the capacity to respond when the unthinkable happened.
When it did happen — and it did — I was there.
Managing crisis call centers, leading teams, consulting in command centers, supporting organizations through aviation disasters, terrorist attacks, mass casualty events and the kind of human loss that changes everyone in the room.
The work was meaningful. Deeply so.
I was in service to survivors and to people who had lost someone they loved. I showed up with everything I had. What I didn’t recognize — couldn’t fully see at the time — was what it was costing me. My nervous system was in a state of chronic hyperarousal. Always on. Always ready. Holding the grief and sadness of others…and quietly accumulating my own.
I was running on fumes and calling it dedication.
Yet even then, there was a search for beauty. Especially then. Photography was the thread that kept me connected to wonder when the work was hard. I wasn’t looking for beauty as an escape. I was looking for it as evidence. Proof that it was still there — and that I could still find it.
my world of art
My camera has always been the way I find my way back to beauty.
As a fine art photographer, I make images of the unseen — not the hidden, the overlooked. The beauty that exists at the edges of attention, present and luminous for those willing to slow down and look.
My work lives in liminal spaces — the silent threshold where all possibility hovers in a single luminous pause.
My images are often mistaken for paintings. Each one is original fine art photography created in-camera, in the moment — a practice of learning to move with the light, the body in conversation with the rhythm and breath of water and land.
I hold time with my camera as sacred — arriving with reverence, in ceremony and offering, entering into communion with the natural world before a single image is made. I am a Pacific Northwest yogi, an eco-spiritualist and a shamanic practitioner. I no longer go out to get the shot. I go out to show up in devotion and to witness the magic that is revealed.
I make work that transforms spaces. People often tell me they feel a sense of calm, of space, of something in the body quietly settling.
Beauty is not just decoration. It is medicine and messenger.
Melissa Anne • Fine Art Photographer
my world of wellness
Moving from the outer to the inner landscape
I left my disaster career in 2015 and embarked on a healing journey beginning with mindfulness and somatic release practices. In 2017 a traumatic brain injury asked me to be still in a way I hadn’t chosen. For over a year, my camera and much of my familiar life were out of reach. While recovering, I found Yoga…or Yoga found me…and so transformed my life that it became not just a practice but a way of living. The healing was so profound it led me to yoga teacher training to offer others what had been offered to me. And I didn’t stop there. I continued to explore and deepen my own practices and services for others. Working with shamanic practices, sacred cacao, becoming a certified Parts Practitioner and pursuing somatic training. I built a holistic practice of turning toward the inner landscape combining ancient and modern practices with the same curiosity and reverence I learned to bring to the natural world.
This is the foundation of what I now call the Art of Wellness — the belief that beauty, inner work and the natural world are medicine.
Wellness is a devotional art. Welcome to a healthstyle with beauty as guide.
Melissa Anne • Wellness Practitioner
I go out to show up, and to witness the magic that is revealed.
I go in to show up, and to witness the magic that is revealed.
The outer landscape and the inner — both waiting.
Beauty on your walls. Beauty within.
This is what I have created and what my body has survived, remembered and informed.
Together, this is my body of work.
Join me.
Fun Facts & Fierce Foundations: I have made my home in all four directions of the United States and carry each with me. I am currently completing certificates for Psychosomatic and Ecstatic Trance Postures Facilitation. My spiritual lineages include Integral Yoga, Total Yoga Nidra, and Mayan Cacao Wisdom traditions. I am learning to play the frame drum — because women have always been drummers and that history deserves to come home.
Though trained in the Integral Yoga tradition, following the organization’s inadequate response to disclosures of guru misconduct I have ended my affiliation with the Integral Yoga Institute. The lineage of the teachings holds value. The misuse of power within spiritual…or any…leadership does not.
Harm is harm.
I have a deep love for and connection with herons. I visit them at the shoreline almost every day. We have become deeply connected and I expect my feathers to appear any day now. Once, on a shamanic journey, I had coffee in town with one — sitting in the pavilion on a sunny day, my bestie across the table, the most natural thing in the world. In the deepest corners of my heart, that is how it’s supposed to be. We are meant to be in friendship with the natural world, not separate from it.
A book is coming. The herons already know.