Tuscany 2024 Participants

Helida Dodd is a Perfumer for lovers of beautiful fragrances who can’t tolerate traditional perfumes. Through her carefully curated ingredients, she shows you how luxury + nature mix perfectly in a bottle.

Helida is a speaker for organizations and groups and uses perfume as a sensorial component to teach critical thinking, create new habits, and form cohesive teams.

Jill Harris studied writing at Mount Holyoke College and the UMass Amherst MFA program.  She’s worked in PR, written a column for twenty-somethings when she was twenty-something, edited Hartford Hospital’s global resource manual on integrative medicine, and penned articles and short stories for a variety of publications.  The New York Times wrote a feature piece about her work helping women in the 90’s tell their stories, and she’s interviewed a cast of beautiful human beings, including Director Sidney Lumet, actor Alan Arkin, and Bernard Lafayette, Jr.  She just finished her first song, Firefly, which will be recorded this summer.

Rishma Walji trained as a Naturopathic Doctor and also has a PhD. I spent about 20 years in clinical practice working with hormones and fertility (none of which prepared me to raise my two teen daughters!). For the past few years, I’ve transitioned away from clinical practice and into looking at intentional decision making (which is the topic of the book I’m researching and writing). I spent a long time helping people make huge decisions in their life (related to family planning, IVF, etc) and I’m deeply curious about psychology and neuroscience. A lot of my work is related to self-awareness and emotion that often guides (or misleads) our life choices. I opened up vulnerably on a TEDx stage (thankfully, I survived!), and now I host a narrative style, personal growth podcast called XO Conversations.  Personally, I love to dance (mostly just around my kitchen), travel (always up for a trip) and have exciting adventures (love heights and cool experiences). Please feel free to reach out, I love connecting with people. 

Hi, I’m Angy, a model/Actress and Entrepreneur living in New York City. I’m originally from the Dominican Republic and raised in Houston Texas. My background is in Accounting and I love to travel, eat delicious food and read rapturous books.

Leah Campbell Badertscher, J.D., is an artist, writer, and life coach. She’s the founder of The Art School, creator of The Art School Podcast, has self-published a book of poetry, Wild Blue Yonder, and is currently working on her first novel. She lives on a farm in Michigan with her husband and three children.

Denise Soler Cox is an award-winning activist filmmaker, top podcaster, speaker and author. She has spoken on hundreds of stages and worked with major brands like Microsoft, Starbucks and L’Oreal to name a few. Denise’s work with Project Eñye has been featured on NBC Nightly News, Forbes.com, and CNN, among others. She is a distinguished member of the Stanford Latino Leaders Entrepreneur Program and was honored with the 2018 “Bridge Builder Award in Education” from the Virginia Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. Denise is currently producing her second feature-length documentary and writing a book on Belonging.

Christina Dexter is a freelance communicator who helps social advocacy groups talk about their priorities by telling the stories of the people they impact. She is most proud of her non-professional life, where she weaves fierce fictional and non-fictional tales and works to make writing accessible to voices that society says are small. She has worked with cooperatives of rural cocoa farmers in Ecuador and has lived in North India, working with groups of women and girls. In 2021, she became a certified instructor of the Gateless Writing Method and used the method as an empowerment tool during workshops with women and girls on her most recent trip to India. Christina is a South Dakota State University graduate and resides in a tiny house on her family’s farm near Kansas City, Missouri.

Dr. Sarah Johnson is a Public History Consultant who conducts historical research, writes, and lectures about 19th-21st century American history. Her knowledge of American material culture was honed through twenty years of teaching undergraduate and graduate design students to critically analyze objects in museum collections within broader frameworks of culture, communications, and technology so they could become more informed designers and makers of objects. She has extensive public history experience, working with museum collections, local historical societies, and on digital projects to make historical artifacts and images more accessible. She’s transitioning to writing full time!