Director Bios

Lillian Skinner - Managing Director

After decades spent in information systems and emerging technology, Lillian pivoted to what she saw as the next frontier: understanding humanity's whole integrated intelligence. As a futurist and interdisciplinary systems thinker, she recognized that the frameworks available for understanding and navigating a reality filled with change were insufficient. She also recognized AI was going to be an amazing tool for the multidimensional thinkers or an intelligence that uses humans as tools.

For the last six years she has researched and written extensively on humanity's full intelligence. Covering everything from embodied cognition to integrated processing to higher-dimensional thinking, she has sought to redefine creative intelligence in a more accurate and holistic manner. She has written hundreds of research papers and developed novel intelligence models that restores how humanity's intelligence operates in its most adaptive and highest functioning state. Her work establishes what the existing literature has left largely undefined, how incredible humanity's native creative intelligence is and why it represents the adaptive capacity humanity needs most.

As the mother of three profoundly gifted, sensitive, creative children, the reality of their future gave her mission its shape. Working with other creative individuals, whose intelligence has also remained whole, they have built an institute that redefines what intelligence is and how it should be cultivated to adapt to the future humanity faces.

Farah Lakoues - Creative Director

Farah is a creative director and stylist with decades of experience in the fashion, music, and entertainment industries. Known for blending contradicting methods of artistry with her holistic strategy she has styled global icons, led major brand collaborations, and designed bespoke pieces with a focus on luxury, ethics and sustainability. Farah is driven by compassion, unbounded creativity, and the gift that brings the whole picture together with artistry and strategy which inspires an authentic and lasting impact.

Her expertise spans high-fashion styling, bespoke garment design, utilisation of sustainable textiles and up cycling processes, multidisciplinary artistry and beyond traditional methods in movement, scenic, set and props keeping a distinct mixture of digital art, graffiti paints and contrasting backdrops or layering of natural open spaces and surfaces - these elements and disciplines are consistent throughout her career. She has initiated global campaigns, brand collaborations, and advertising projects with some of the world’s largest brands, and high profile clientele, while also curating and funding her own disruptive startups, lecturing at several music academies and colleges, and consulting on R&D projects that champion sustainability and disruptive business models.

Beth Anne Johnson - Communication and Home School Director

Beth Anne Johnson is a social science practitioner and educator with over a decade of experience in higher education. She holds a Master of Science in Leisure Science and degrees in English and the Performing Arts. In 2025, she became a home educator to her twice-exceptional son, deepening her commitment to learner-centered, whole-child development.

Beth Anne is a dynamic force—balancing life as a mother, educator, and advocate for all learners. Her teaching philosophy blends creativity, play, and strengths-based practices to unlock each child’s holistic potential. She believes sensitive and neurodivergent children don’t need to be fixed—they need the freedom to play a different game, on their own terms, with success defined by the learner themselves.

Her graduate research in leisure science, grounded in liberation, revealed compelling parallels between the experiences of women in male-dominated sports and students navigating traditionally exclusive academic spaces, such as engineering and computer science. She has shared this work nationally, including presentations at the 2022 ADVANCE Equity in STEM Convening and the 2024 CoNECD Conference.

Beth Anne’s contributions have been widely recognized. In 2022, she received the WEPAN Women in Engineering Champion Award for her leadership and advocacy in STEM education. In 2025, she was honored with the Clemson University President’s Commission on Women Alumna Award, celebrating her sustained impact across education, research, and community engagement.

Amy Stevens - Bridge Director

Amy builds and maintains functional bridges between creative systems thinkers and the wider world, translating across cultures, disciplines, and systems.

Amy W. Stevens is a former intellectual property attorney with more than 25 years of experience advising creators, record labels, publishers, and startups, and whose current path began long before law. Her early life included international travel as an elite NCAA Division I athlete and extended periods living in both Japan and Australia—experiences that built deep cross-cultural fluency and an instinct for navigating complex systems. After having lived what she jokingly calls “three lifetimes” before the age of 40, Amy stepped away from a thriving legal practice in 2010 to undertake the most demanding and meaningful work of her life: designing and stewarding the education and development of her son, a creative systems thinker with a voracious, kinesthetic, learn-by-doing mind. She redirected the full force of her legal rigor, research capacity, and creative curiosity into inquiry-driven learning, where a single question could trigger months-long exploration across multiple disciplines. In the process, she rediscovered and integrated long-suppressed aspects of her own creative nature, becoming both a fierce protector and whimsical co-explorer in her son’s journey. She is equally at home in serious analysis and joyful play – and believes the most powerful work happens when both are allowed to co-exist.

James Plant - Director, Neuroscientist, Bio-Inspired Inventor, and Interdisciplinary Systems Thinker

James body of work reflects a lifelong commitment to integrated intelligence. His career bridges art, engineering, and theoretical research, unified by a focus on identifying the underlying patterns that give rise to complex systems. Originally trained as a portrait artist, James learned that capturing reality is not about reproducing every detail, but about discerning the structural features that convey identity and function. That principle has guided his approach to innovation ever since. In robotics and technology development, he studies nature not to replicate its forms, but to extract its governing principles and translate them into new capabilities.

As founder of a robotics company whose systems were deployed in high-risk emergency environments, and later used in astronaut training, James has consistently worked at the intersection of disciplined analysis and creative integration. His ongoing research explores geometric and dimensional models that seek coherence across domains often treated in isolation.

He joins the board with the conviction that the future depends on restoring integrated intelligence, reconnecting fragments into meaningful wholes and cultivating the kind of higher-dimensional thinking that enables genuine innovation.

Michael Strauss- Director, Entrepreneur, Inventor, Strategic Partner

Michael is a master business startup creator and maker. Michael began his career at 19 years old. He knew even then he didn’t want to toil away in the corporate grind. After his first 2 years in college, he co-founded a software development company that created several commercial entertainment products. After three and a half years, he exited the company successfully and finished up college in 1999 with a degree in Computer Science (with a focus in Artificial Intelligence) and minors in mathematics, physics, and chemistry.

Upon graduation he was recruited to work at a dot-com startup, Telenisus, focused on cyber security before getting recruited again by multiple Fortune 100 corporations, including banking (Bank of America) and defense (General Dynamics Armament and Technical Products). Highly motivated, he spent his days working in corporate America, and his nights and weekends consulting for various start-ups and still found time to complete his MBA with a concentration in finance before turning 30.

Understanding he had maxed out what more he could learning in large companies, he moved full time to being a start-up addict using all of his skills and experience to become a successful consultant, serial business founder, and serial patent creator.
To say he is well rounded is an understatement. Michael worked in emerging technologies in a multitude of areas including: cyber security, pharmaceuticals, private industry, merger and acquisitions, corporate strategy, military and defense, and more. Michael worked every area of a successful startup from business development, contract negotiations, technical development, patent creation, fundraising and technology innovation. He is the rare individual who can move fluidly from technical speak to strategy to sales. It is not an exaggeration to say he is truly a Renaissance Man.

Michael's journey to understand his neurodivergence was fairly recent. Initially, he did not want to recognize his differences, having society’s stigmas ground into his psyche. In his 40s, he finally sought out diagnosis and the changes it brought were life altering. He was shocked at how much easier navigating life could be. He sees that the knowledge of self he obtained on his journey was the most profound gift he ever received. Michael always identified as gifted but embracing his neurodivergence has shown him how to enhance all of his abilities.