About Us
If intuition is the voice of the soul, then creativity is that voice expressed.
Evangeline and Jo Anne each bring more than four decades of professional communications experience to Intuitive Leaps Creative. We became friends 20+ years ago through the Speaking Circles facilitator-training program, and our relationship deepened in improvisational personal storytelling circles. In 2003, we began our professional partnership with a comprehensive website re-design for a national nonprofit organization. That’s when we discovered shared sensibilities, complementary talents and skills, and a passion for meaningful collaboration, powerful presence and authentic self-expression.
Evangeline Welch
“My vision is to inspire others to nurture their creative spirits and to deepen their awareness of the power of intuition in their personal lives and work.”
Evangeline has been a self-employed communications professional since 1988, with most of her focus during the past 30 years working with mission-driven organizations and in the field of personal transformation.
She currently provides leadership consulting, content editing and website development, and presents programs on the Enneagram, creativity, storytelling and expressive arts. Evangeline is a certified facilitator for Speaking Circles and Relational Presence. She works online and in Shreveport, LA and the San Francisco Bay Area.
Evangeline has been a staff member of The Narrative Enneagram (TNE) for 20 years and is an International Enneagram Association (IEA) Accredited Enneagram Professional. She joined TNE as marketing director and webmaster in 2005, and served as the editor of TALK, the member newsletter, from 2014-2020. She has hosted monthly “Third Thursday” Narrative Enneagram Community Gatherings on Zoom since March 2020 and also serves as TNE Communications Advisor.
She started her communications career as a reporter for a daily newspaper, The Shreveport Journal, in 1978. She also previously served as the editor and art director for Shreveport Magazine and San Francisco Business magazine, and manager of communications for the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce and Shreveport Chamber of Commerce. In 1988, she launched her own business providing creative services for corporations, nonprofits and small businesses.
In 1997, Evangeline founded a transformational art process that evokes deep play called Paint Dancing™ (her own intuitive leap), taught Paint Dancing workshops for 10 years, was a featured artist at the Red River Revel in 2000, and served as artist-in-residence for the International Conference on Business and Consciousness. She became a facilitator for the Inner Journey Institute in 2002. She also has traveled throughout North America on an “intuitive pilgrimage” interviewing people making a difference in the world for a collection of inspiring stories on intuition and the creative process.
Evangeline is deeply grateful to live adjacent to a small lake in Shreveport, LA, which sits along the Mississippi Flyway, a major route for migrating shorebirds and songbirds, and as wintering grounds for wading birds and waterfowl. Attuning to and photographing the different species of birds from her home on Spring Lake has become both an ongoing creative process and spiritual practice. Her growing photography collection, “Beaux Rivages / Beautiful Shores," began in March 2020 when sheltering in place during the Covid lockdown. She continues to cultivate solace and sanctuary as she observes the birds’ natural rhythms and flight patterns throughout the seasons and years. Spring Lake offers up its own reflections through cold gray days of winter to the vibrant, glimmering hues of autumn.
Evangeline also finds joy, meaning and connection as a member of a group of seven improvisational storytellers who have shared narratives of their lives with each other for more than 20 years.
Jo Anne Smith
“I value intuition, collaboration, the power of story, and the creative potential of silence.”
Jo Anne founded Public Presence Consulting more than 30 years ago to help individuals and organizations expand their public presence online, in person, and in print. A few years later, she partnered with Evangeline to enjoy the pleasure and practical benefits of working in collaboration.
She brings extensive expertise and experience designing, developing and maintaining websites. After years consulting for nonprofits and small businesses, these days she specializes in creating a comfortable design and development process for creative and helping sole proprietors, including authors, artists, therapists, coaches, and more. She is a Squarespace Circle Member, a special designation for experienced designers in the Squarespace platform.
Jo Anne freelanced for McGraw-Hill Publishing for many years, and now provides content editing for web copy, memoir and other nonfiction writing, and collateral materials.
Combining her experience as a Certified Speaking Circles® Facilitator with her background as a grief counselor and bereavement group leader, Jo Anne now facilitates in-person and online Aging & End-of-Life workshops.
She has also facilitated popular public speaking and personal storytelling workshops, and produced and directed storytelling showcases, seminars and other events. She spent five years as associate producer on award-winning educational videos and multimedia. Her projects included co-producing a documentary on the theme of women reclaiming their voices.
Her professional experience also includes serving as the executive director of Speaking Circles International, and a teacher and center administrator of Transcendental Meditation. She was ordained as a minister by the Center for Soulful Living and leads mentoring groups for CSL peers.
Jo Anne works in the San Francisco Bay Area and the ethers of the Internet.