AMANDA KELLY ESPIRITU

ARTIST | EXECUTIVE PRODUCER | COMMUNITY BUILDER

The Founder of Creative Surrender Studios, Amanda loves to play in the intersection of art, adventure, and advocacy. She’s worked with creatives and entrepreneurs around the world to reignite their passions, sate their curiosity, and connect with other supernova human beings to create, collaborate, and celebrate together.

Amanda designs and produces bespoke immersive events, workshops, retreats, festivals, short films, and more that showcase people all over the world stepping into their own power and kickstarting themselves out of whatever rut they might be in by dancing and singing in public, talking about failure, and more. She believes that by building up global communities and amplifying each others’ stories we can make the world a more joyful and extraordinary place.

Amanda loves diving down rabbit holes about the importance of artivism, creativity, friendship around the world, and what gets people out of bed in the morning. She loves experimenting with mixing all sorts of creative mediums—from creating hand-painted wearble art, to shooting and dancing in music videos, to creating Emergency Survival Care Packages and #LoveBombs for friends old and new.

Fun Fact(s) about Amanda:

• She once ran and danced around Singapore in a red panda onesie at sunrise in 90°F humidity.

• She’s a third culture kid navigating the occasional identity crisis after being raised between LA, Manila, SF, and London and getting bit by the travel bug early. She hit 25 countries before she turned 25 and hasn’t stopped exploring the world since.

• After backpacking around Argentina and falling in love with a man from Brazil and a woman from Amsterdam, she’s a proud member of the Alphabet Mafia (aka the fab LGBTQ+ community) and embraces fluidity in all things.

• She solo tripped around Japan with a major concussion a month after being mugged in NYC (with permission from her doctor).

• The only thing she is 100% sure about is that she’s 90% tea.

Produced by Creative Surrender Studios | 03.10.19 | Amanda Kelly Espiritu dancing through the Cloud Forest at Gardens By The Bay, Singapore & Beyond.

ON THE BOOK

Amanda’s debut book Creative Surrender: Embracing Artivism, Global Collaboration, & Celebration was published in January 2021 - Snag a copy for you and one for your loved ones below!

WHO IS THIS BOOK FOR?

For anyone who’s ever felt stuck in a rut.

For anyone who’s ever felt lonely and unsure of their place in their family, their friend group, and longed for community.

For anyone who hasn’t been sure how to get out of bed some mornings and just needed to be a burrito blanket.

For anyone who’s thought to themselves, “It’s too late.”

BECAUSE A WHOLE LOT CAN HAPPEN IN JUST A YEAR…

ON EMBRACING CREATIVITY IN ALL ITS FORMS

ART + ADVOCACY = ARTIVISM

Since she was a young girl, Amanda Kelly Espiritu has been fascinated with art, visual culture, and the freedom that comes with self-expression. She was always encouraged to set off on adventures and fell in love with creating immersive experiences that surprised and delighted her family and friends.

Never one to get lost in coloring books or stay within the lines, Amanda embraced art from pre-school. Doodles quickly overtook single sheets of paper and could not be contained in small sketchbooks, while paint splashed over the borders of canvases and splattered living room walls and carpets. Collages expanded across bedroom floors, overtaking piles of magazines and glue bottles stacked haphazardly amongst newspaper clippings and post cards. Much of her mixed media work has been inspired by the courses she took at Boston College under Professor Andrew Tavarelli and Professor Alston Conley who both encouraged her to get off the canvas and paint murals and create living art collections. 

Captivated by the vivid worlds of nursery rhymes and fairytales and always eager for more stories since she was a child, Amanda also delved into the legends preserved by cultures around the globe and became enchanted with Ancient Egypt and Greek and Roman mythology during grammar school and was in awe of the power of storytelling. As she continued to explore other cultures and different forms of art and storytelling, she began crafting her own stories and poems. She was introduced to spoken word in high school and was encouraged to start performing by her English teacher Elizabeth Purcell at St. Ignatius College Preparatory in San Francisco after sharing her poem on racial stereotypes.

Inspired by her teachers, Amanda has set out to help others activate their own creative superpowers to shed light on what people are fighting to change, determined to preserve, and loves to play with others where art, adventure, and advocacy intersect.

ON GLOBAL COMMUNITIES

BECAUSE ART, MUSIC, & PASSION TRANSCEND COUNTRY BORDERS & LANGUAGE BARRIERS

Originally born in LA, Amanda grew up around the world in Manila, SF, London, and went to university in Boston. She has travelled extensively throughout Europe and Asia with her family and friends, and solo-backpacked through Japan and Argentina. She hopes to continue to explore South America in the near future so she can see the Nazca Lines and Salar de Uyuni in person. She captures her passion for traveling and people's love of life and adventure in her photography/video projects, watercolor journals, and short stories. 

Amanda travelled the world with Hacker Paradise in 2020 and worked remotely for her global clients. As an Executive Producer for events, festivals, retreats, short films, and more Amanda designs bespoke experiences for creatives, remote workers, and entrepreneurs that organically grow collaborative, global communities and inspire people to reignite their passions and think creatively.

Before moving abroad, Amanda’s home base was in New York City, where she worked with various startups, entrepreneurs, and non-profits as a marketing and social media consultant, a producer of both intimate and large-scale events, and as a key partner when it comes to building global communities of creatives, music addicts, and personal development nerds to name few.

With a background in marketing/advertising from her past life at creative ad agencies BBDO and Ogilvy and a penchant for wearing several hats at once on small global teams, Amanda dove into blazing her own path outside of the typical 9-5 corporate life. Since taking a leap of faith into freelance and contract work in January of 2018, Amanda kept diving further into the underbelly of NYC, attending concerts, dance events, conferences, and more. She fell in love with collaborating with fellow community builders around the world and jumped into producing events that focused on creating open spaces where people could gather to feel a bit less lonely and a lot more inspired.

ON CREATING + COLLABORATING + CELEBRATING

“WHAT MAKES YOU EXCITED TO GET OUT OF BED IN THE MORNING?”

Amanda is one of the founding members of the global artist collective and 501c3 non-profit Stageless Arts and the Global Director. Amanda led the growth of the NY “synapse" Open Brain: NYC which launched in the fall of 2014 and helped grow the SA community by word of mouth. Open Brains have been hosted events in 12 cities worldwide. Amanda regularly helped douse people in confetti for The Confetti Project in NY, LA, and DC and helped launch the project internationally Dubai in January 2018 after leaving corporate. Amanda also MC’d shows for the global community of music addicts across NY with Sofar Sounds, interviewing emerging artists after their sets. Amanda has served in senior management positions and consulting positions at various startups like KettleSpace and The Forcing Function.

In 2019, Amanda founded creative production studio Creative Surrender Studios. CSS serves as a space that pushes people to get out of whatever creative rut they might be in, have deep talks about their dreams, fears, and failures, and makes sure they make time to finish their passion projects. The Creative Surrender: Passion Sprint series launched in February 2019, while the web series component launched in August 2019. For an early CSS episode, Amanda stepped out from behind the camera to conquer her fear of being on camera by dancing in public around Singapore in March 2019 in a red panda onesie and has continued inviting friends and strangers to join in to see how it helped them access their own flow states and unblock whatever may be holding them back from manifesting their dreams.

In 2020, Amanda pivoted a benefit concert she was planning for her birthday in Brazil into a global 24-hour music festival for charity. The Namastay At Home Festival (NAHF April 2020 and NAHF August 2020) was livestreamed from “backstage” on Zoom to Facebook and reached thousands of people via livestreams. Amanda produced and MC’d most of the festival, introducing each artist and hosting a short Q&A with each act after their set. Amanda went on to curated artists for The Quarantine Mixtape Volume 1 as 2020 drew to a close. Amanda co-produced the mixtape with Ricky Smith to feaure 10 artists from around the world who collaborated to record a mixtape of music and spoken word in less than 2 weeks during the 2020 winter holidays.

In 2021, Amanda joined the founding team of Eve Wealth as Head of Community in February 2021 before becoming Chief Community Officer in November of the same year. Eve is a global community building wealth in a web3 world with a feminine lens. Amanda has been guideing Eve’s cohorts and corresponding Circles of women and non-binary members into web3, helped launch both the Eve Foundational and Eve DeFi Curious Courses, and produced Wealthverse Summit. Amanda is dedicated to kicking open doors for more women and QTBIPOC people to have the expert network and resources they need to build generational wealth and 10x the wealth revolution, no matter where in their journey they are.