I’m a coach for artists, creative producers, and those that love them.
Together we’ll have creative and critical conversations that illuminate your work, life, and purpose. Our conversations are where you articulate your roots and prioritize your potential. Where you’re bold, ambitious, and making time for the big ideas and daily practices that will meaningfully alter your mind and way of being.
Consider me your thinking partner, project guide, and life coach.
How do you take care of your creative self? It’s an emotional and risky thing to share your ideas with the world. It can be unpredictable, financially precarious, and lonely to navigate competitive fields while maintaining your personal and creative integrity. It takes courage, resilience and stamina. And no one does it alone.
For over 20 years I’ve navigated institutions, professional collaborations, project management, commercial creative work, public performance, and the highs and lows of a creative life. Whether you are on the precipice of a significant professional opportunity, working through creative challenges, or longing for a rigorous conversation partner to show up for life as fully as possible, I am an experienced coach to unlock your most brilliant visions.
I will meet you where you are, and partner with you to create change you can feel.
How
I offer personalized, 1-on-1 coaching with step-by-step support. Each client is different and I respond to individual needs in our meetings and agreements.
Our agreement can be anything from a one-meeting intensive up to a year, with the amount of time determined by your goals. Our meetings are confidential and I will be your trusted thinking partner, project guide, and life coach. I offer insight, resources, accountability, fun, and growth.
This is a transformational and intimate conversation space we will create together and this commitment, this process, will change us both. It’s a deep, rigorous, and high level thought partnership. I will bring my full experience to every encounter.
When you contact me I will reply with a short questionnaire that will help us both prepare for our first meeting. Then we have a 45-minute, free conversation for us each to determine if we are a good match. We will discuss what you’re looking for, how I work, and I’ll answer any remaining questions that you have.
Meetings are mostly on Zoom, but can be arranged IRL on a case-by-case basis.
I believe a good question has heart—want to talk?
Who You Are
Being engaged and fulfilled in your work and creativity is central to your wellbeing, but your therapist can’t talk about your work. The struggle to create, inspire, develop, to lead collaborators, to perform, to own your own small business and be true to your values—these are crucial conversations that often happen in informal settings. That can be complicated and has its limits. I can help.
I can help you manage the intensities and rhythm of creative life—development, process, feedback, presentation, being public, recuperation.
I can help you discover and articulate the deep roots that motivate your decisions, life, and work.
I can help you integrate challenges and create the conditions to do your best work.
• Are you in a creative industry aimed at commercial success but still want to have the deep talks about ideas, form, and purpose?
• Are you in a high intensity career moment, or planning for one? I can partner you through it.
About
Hi, my name is Every Ocean Hughes. I’m an artist, writer, coach, and death doula. I have 20 years of experience making exhibitions, performances, and transdisciplinary projects internationally at venues such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, Tate Modern, the Museum of Modern Art, Museo Reina Sofia, Moderna Museet, and many more. For 10+ years I’ve been a professor of fine art in Europe and the US, working with masters and PhD candidates across creative disciplines.
I originally studied international politics and critical race theory as an undergrad and then I took an art class. I’ve always been thinking and working across disciplines and that led me to the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York City, and a MA from UCLA. I was a fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University in 2019–2020 and from 2017–2021 I studied to be a death doula, including 9 months with the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care.
I’ve designed products for MoMA × Uniqlo’s t-shirt series and a pair of eyeglasses for l.a.Eyeworks. I’ve worked with musicians and written lyrics for bands. I’ve designed costumes for the band Le Tigre and several downtown NY choreographers. I’ve presented lectures at universities, museums, and conferences from Los Angeles to Hong Kong. I’ve published all kinds of writing in many kinds of publications. My films have screened at the Berlinale (twice) and Outfest (several times) amongst others. And my work has been covered in publications like the New York Times, the Guardian, the New Yorker, Artforum, the BBC, and many more internationally.
All the while I’ve been thinking about the support structures required to be able to pursue creativity, make work that matters to others, and be our full selves.
Testimonials
"What surprised me the most was that I was able to be so honest and unashamed of what I am feeling and experiencing at this point in my career. This work is deeply emotional and practical at the same time. If you are feeling lost and need some support to understand how you can shift your process you should do this. I felt this was a very rich and rare opportunity to work with an artist I have known and admired for so long." - LR
"Working with Every has been transformational to my process as a filmmaker and how I relate to my work. I find that I am giving myself more grace and permission. I needed a thinking partner to help me through a tough personal project, someone to guide me as I navigate the murkiness and uncertainty of the material. I felt saturated, energized and much more clear after our one-on-one sessions. Every brings to the process not only her expansive experience as an artist, but vulnerability, integrity and intuition. That is a rare gift." - Elliot M.
"The biggest breakthrough I had was taking time for me, asking hard questions, listening to the answers, and activating a plan. The work we embarked on together felt very much like a true collaboration in every definition of the word. The conversations we had, which were generally informed by a series of intuitive and introspective inquiries, flowed effortlessly and led to other conversations that peeled away layers of the onion that has been my stagnancy for many years - personally, professionally and creatively. The depth at which we dove was quite deeper than I expected - and the outcome was more subtle, yet more powerful than I imagined." - TS
"What I appreciated the most was the new perspectives on old conundrums that really allowed me to reframe my practice as belonging to a larger world and a history of working artists. Working with Every breathed fresh life into my practice that I’ve been missing for years. It’s way cheaper than grad school but maybe more useful." - SS
“Every makes waves. Grounded, direct, and empathic, she cuts through the fog of self-doubt or procrastination, clearing a path for a bouyant and practical way forward. I feel supported and electrified by our conversations, and leave them with the energy to move through my projects, the wind at my back. She has given me the permission to succeed, to easily apply the skills and assets that are closest to me, but that I often fail to notice. My confidence and my ability to apply my talents has increased exponentially since speaking with Every — I’m just better at what I do and it’s all her fault.” — GW
“She understands me and takes me very seriously. She’s unsentimental and practical, imaginative and warm, sensitively intelligent and intelligently sensitive.” — LT
“. . . a kind and effusive presence.” — Laura Snapes, The Guardian
“When we first met this fall I asked what she had been doing. What had she seen lately. Nothing she laughed. And her laughter created an awful lot of space in the room. It was very early on but that’s when I began thinking seriously about Every’s gravity. What I call the style of her authority. There’s very little shame going on that I can see.
She did tell me about learning scuba diving. That’s what she did last summer. How come. I asked. It was for pleasure. She wanted to be in another space. At the end of our conversation she told me her constant dream is breathing under water. I thought in the continuum of people who do everything, the ones who are always touted for how much they do, there are also the people who assert that they really do nothing, sometimes, all the time, and adamantly so. It’s a little bit regal but, more importantly, it’s off-center. I’ve always been fascinated by that assertion and what it means. So if you’re not going out what are you doing instead. The answer is clear. You might be talking, thinking, preparing another world. And that’s what I think is going on here. I thought about qingtan, the art of pure conversation, which was practiced centuries ago by Daoist intellectuals in China. It was considered a way of leaving the world. I wonder if thinking itself is the purest kind of art. Perhaps the only way one can claim the act of thinking in America is to call it art.
When I talk about Every’s gravity what I mean is that she is recognizing her time as a space and she’s being a player in it. There’s always an open space in time if you see it that way. And she does.” — Eileen Myles, poet
Header photos: The Piers Untitled by Every Ocean Hughes, 2009–2023.
Portraits of Every Ocean Hughes by Märta Thisner.
Website designed by Bryce Wilner and Matt Wolff.