ABOUT MARIEL

Mariel is a full-time lecturer and fellow at Stanford's Life Design Lab, where she creates modules for and co-teaches the Design Your Life courses alongside Bill Burnett. She project manages, co-creates, and co-teaches the Design Your Spiritual Life courses in collaboration with Stanford’s Office of Religious and Spiritual Life. Her new and original course on designing for sacred relationships and community begins in January 2026. She co-designed and is co-teaching the inaugural Story Pharmacy course and student fellowship with the Stanford Storytelling Project. She teaches undergrads and grad students, as well as other professional educators across the globe looking to integrate Life Design and social-emotional-relational experiential learning at their schools.

She is devoted to investigating and designing the future of interfaith and non-denominational spiritual communities, learning how to support and nourish the spiritual needs of young people, and creating technologies and experiences that deepen (not replace) our embodied wisdom.

Outside of her work at Stanford, she designs and guides communal rituals, coaches seekers through sabbaticals and career transitions, teaches playfighting, runs experiments in communal living, designs residencies and retreats, reads tarot at tea parties, and facilitates immersive workshops.

She has a past life as a scientist, has published research on fish biomimetics, and spent three years researching neural correlates of chronic pain to help make better brain- and spine-computer interfaces. She has trained as a Chan Buddhist monastic, lived in anarchist creative community in pallet racks by the Salton Sea, and continues to run experiments in rich, intentional, and communal living. She has co-produced immersive multimedia installations drawing everywhere from 50 to 500 attendees. She ritually tattoos her friends. She speaks 5 languages, is the daughter of Eastern European immigrants, and is a joyful traveller of this enormous tiny planet.

She has worked with and for the magical teams at Wefunder, Sylva, and Parents are Human.

She is an alchemist, vibe-doula, and agent of benevolent mischief.