Hi! I’m Emily, an Ivy League Witch

I started out as a dancer and theatre kid from just outside Pittsburgh. Born into a deeply Catholic family (trust I’m still working my way out of that artful patriarchal programming), I grew up in the same home my father was born and raised in, and my parents still live there. 

Both sides of the family were peasants who got out, and worked hard for every penny. When the family business went bust during the Great Depression, it quite literally killed my great grandfather. So, 57 years before my cue, there were already deep-seated ideas about work, money, and the high-stakes drama of both. Not exactly a healthy inheritance.

I started dance school at 3, and my younger brother followed me there a few years later. It wasn’t long before I was pushed out of the spotlight (where I would have preferred to be), my brother was deemed the star, and our lifelong roles were cast. We’re still trying to break those molds, especially as we’ve matured and realized we’d have been happier in the others’ shoes. 

By 12 I was full-tilt in love with theatre, and obsessed with Broadway. Sure, I did student council, dance team, even senior year as a drum major who couldn’t really read sheet music—but theatre was my obsession. After earning some required credits at (the Catholic) Duquesne University, I transferred to Point Park University to follow my dream of performing and instead found myself repeating patterns from adolescence—being passed over again and again for every part. I was once again deemed by others (and thus came to believe) that I was part of the ‘untalented’ crowd. I was not the star and learned early on, and often, the pain of not being seen by those who ‘mattered.’ I handed my power over to people who found me invisible.

Still, after I graduated, I was drawn to New York City like an iron filing to an industrial magnet. I gave myself a year to audition and landed plenty of callbacks. But every time, someone else got the part. I moved on. 

I’d long been interested in the business side of show business, and soon landed an array of internships for a producer, a casting director, a general manager, and company manager, and even got to work with Rhoda herself, Valerie Harper, becoming her assistant and social media manager before that was a real job. 

When I landed a receptionist job in a Broadway PR office, I felt at home. That’s where I also discovered what I call my “access kink”—I loved having special access to the talent, events, and being privy to insider info. I discovered I have a real affinity for VIP. Still do.

Six months later, I was assigned to a team for specific shows, and loving every minute of it. Two and a half years later, the company up and evaporated and sent us all scurrying for jobs. What followed was an amazing learning experience in a PR job with both Lincoln Center Theater and notorious producer Scott Rudin, working on A Raisin in the Sun starring Denzel Washington, This Is Our Youth with Kieran Culkin, Tavi Gevinson, and Michael Cera, and Moss Hart’s Act One starring Tony Shalhoub. With A Raisin in the Sun I got my first taste of the winner’s room at the Tony Awards - I’d spent that spring navigating director Kenny Leon’s nominee campaign for the show and he won for Best Direction of a Play. Talk about VIP.

From there, I got poached a mainstream PR agency, to be their inhouse Broadway expert. The only problem? Since the work was far from the lights of Broadway (literally and figuratively), PR lost its shine for me. I was desperate to get back to the theatre. It took a few years for me to cut the cords of that job, but after I did, Disney came knocking and I found myself publicizing The Lion King and Aladdin.

During a stretch of uncertainty at that agency, I started getting requests for private work and launched my own business with my first $1,000 client in 2017. I was leaning on what I knew, not what I loved, but it took difficult clients and lots of time to hammer home the truth: That this was still not it for me. The pandemic was a serious reset—no Broadway, no shows. The industry got creative, but it was a nail in the coffin for me. I knew it was time for a serious shift. 

A few months before taking the leap to agency life, my Noni died and I dove into therapy— thank heavens I did. A year into my new job, I was feeling aimless and wanting direction, to revisit my life and some of the choices I was making. My therapist was a little different from your average shrink. She was the first person to introduce me to something I’d been missing in my life: my spirituality. A connection to something bigger, a way to access a higher power that was outside of the realm of organized religion. I had no idea there were other options or modalities. 

She was also the one to introduce me to the Tarot—which at the time I knew nothing about beyond that scene in Now and Then, and being too scared to watch The Craft in high school. Everything I knew about the cards was BS. What I understand now is that Tarot is nothing more than a tool — one that is accessible to anyone. 

When I was gifted my first Tarot deck, I started practicing, and reading other people, and felt a kind of energy and focus rise in me that I hadn’t felt in years. 

The cards became an incredible source of clarity and courage for me during the dark days of the pandemic. And I became fully immersed in the study of Tarot, how it worked, why it worked, what it meant. 

EDUCATIONAL BACKGROUND

During the pandemic pause, I had a revelation, went back to school, and earned my Masters in Psychology in Education from Columbia’s Spirituality Mind Body Institute. I did my thesis on Tarot as an effective tool for self reflection, and participants reported more clarity after a single 30-minute reading—the data showed a 7.7 on a scale of 10. I even presented this work at the Princeton Theological Seminary as part of the American Psychological Association’s conference on Spirituality and Religion. 

This study has expanded the breadth and depth of my understanding of the connection between spirituality and psychology, and has given me a solid foundation in the scientific and academic findings behind human flourishing. 

Currently, I live in Manhattan, not far from the lights of Broadway. 

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