Lise Melvin & Maggie Williams

Co-Directors and Somatic Coaches

Lise Melvin is a certified Somatic Coach, a global leader in sustainability, and a mother. At her back is a 20+ year career in collaborative efforts to change systems globally, and a decade+ of working with embodiment and somatics. She now teaches with the Strozzi Institute and serves as Co-Director, alongside having a live coaching and bodywork practice.
 
Lise is a highly skilled facilitator, who inspires immediate trust and openness, and is masterful at holding space and tapping into the energy in a room to support transformation and collaboration.
 
She spent 8 years advising the United Nations on how to transform food and agriculture systems through collaboration. She is the founding CEO of the Better Cotton Initiative – set up to transform cotton production to be more sustainable globally. She has a Bachelor's in Environmental Life Science and a Master's in Responsibility in Business Practice.
 
Lise is committed to bringing her full power to creating a more sustainable and just world for all beings, and lives with a deep respect for diversity and difference. Lise meditates daily alongside other practices that resource her aliveness and resilience. She has studied the Vedas, compassionate communication, storytelling, deep ecology, and systems change.
 
Maggie Williams is Co-Director of the Strozzi Institute for Somatics (SI), a Lead Teacher, and a Somatic Coach. Her focus areas include how social conditions shape us, how we cultivate more individual and collective resilience, and how somatics can support values-aligned parenting.
 
Prior to working with SI, Maggie co-founded and co-directed The Advocacy Institute, an organization that trains social justice and movement-building groups to lead more effective legislative campaigns. Over the course of a decade, Maggie developed curriculum, created technical tools, raised financial resources, managed a staff team, and trained over 200 organizers and advocates across New York State in legislative strategy. Before co-founding the Advocacy Institute, Maggie worked in the New York State Senate and as an advocate on criminal legal issues.
 
Maggie began with somatics at the Strozzi Institute in 2011 and became a certified somatic coach in 2012. She has studied with generative somatics, worked with clients one-on-one, and led a process to integrate somatics into staff development at the Advocacy Institute.
 
Most of Maggie’s time is spent exploring the wilds of Brooklyn with her two kiddos – fully embodied tiny humans who are her greatest somatics teachers.