About Your Curator
Curating is the practice of discerning, sorting, and choosing objects in a way that makes the most sense — choosing the pieces that best exemplify the subject at hand. Life curation is that same practice turned toward a life: sorting and choosing the objects that best represent a life lived and an identity.
This isn't about minimalism, and it isn't about maximalism. It's about intentionally organizing and genuinely enjoying and caring for what you have. I help people sift through the sediment of years of accumulated objects, identify the talismans of their lives, uncover the bedrock of what is most meaningful, and beautifully, practically organize their homes around it. I call it archaeology of the soul.
I have spent my life studying how people become who they are — how identity and meaning take shape through relationships, culture, and the objects people keep. I am also someone drawn to beautiful objects, and who firmly believes in the power of objects to be talismans and connections to ourselves — both past and present. Mercury & Soul is where that lifelong curiosity in the power of objects to distill identity found a home.
I grew up a third-culture kid, moving between the Arabian Gulf, the UK, and a home country where I never quite fit. I learned to observe people closely and move between worlds — and I got a lot of practice, and a real appreciation for the disruption of moving: deciding what stayed, and finding good homes for what I didn't need. Long before it was a profession, this was simply how I lived.
In college, I was drawn to studying history and culture across the ancient, medieval, and modern worlds, then fell for sociology and social psychology — earning a master's degree and beginning doctoral work. That training gave me language for what I had already lived, and taught me ethnographic research: close, patient observation and analysis that reveals how people understand and create meaning in their own lives.
After September 11th, I left my doctoral program to join the CIA, where I spent more than twenty years in human intelligence — reading motivation and identity, understanding how culture shapes what people are willing to protect or risk, often at the highest stakes. The work demanded creativity in gray areas with no standard playbook, deepened my compassion, let me build and execute strategic programs, and honed my discretion. I also kept moving, again and again becoming practiced at determining what mattered to me and what could be let go.
After more than twenty years, I was ready for a change. The CIA is a remarkable place to serve, but a closed one, built on restriction and sacrifice — and I was looking for a more open, human, creative way to connect with people. That search led me, informally, to helping family sort and curate collected treasures. What began as trying to be helpful became a calling.
Everything converges here: a lifelong practice reading how people build meaning, an academic grounding in culture and ethnography, and decades spent discerning identity and motivation — now turned toward your shelves, your drawers, your keepsakes.
You can trust me with your objects and your stories.
— Marisa
