I’m Naomi Kinsman, an Illumineer, creative strategist, and story-based facilitator.
I design experiences that help individuals, teams, and organizations think more flexibly, collaborate more intentionally, and imagine what else might be possible, especially in moments of change.
My work blends storytelling, creative practice, and reflective thinking to help people navigate complexity: new ideas, new roles, new questions, and new directions.
About Me
I’m fascinated by what becomes possible when we step outside our habitual ways of seeing.
For more than twenty years, I’ve worked with writers, educators, creative people, leaders, teams, and organizations, designing experiences that use story, metaphor, play, and reflection to make invisible things easier to see and explore.
Sometimes that means helping an individual see their creative work from a new angle. Other times I’m helping a team develop shared language for how they want to work together. And recently, it has looked like building an entire imaginative world people can step inside.
Across the landscape of my work, I continue returning to the same question: How can imagination help us see and navigate our real lives differently?
How I Work
My work begins with a simple premise: we don’t have to think about a problem from the same angle where we encountered it.
I use story, metaphor, imaginative play, making, and reflection to help people step outside familiar patterns long enough to see something new.
Over time, I’ve come to call this way of working Illumineering: making invisible things visible so we can explore them with greater curiosity and intention.
Sometimes the best way to understand an idea is to imagine it as an object. A challenge might become a landscape. Different ways of thinking become more navigable when we imagine them as places to move between. Even a team’s culture can become an environment to imagine together.
Metaphor can illuminate a real-world situation, helping us see what was difficult to notice while inside of it.
Rehearsal for Becoming
What if imagination isn’t only something we use to invent fictional worlds, but a way we rehearse possibilities for our real lives?
In this short talk, I explore how story, play, and imagined experience can help us practice ways of thinking and being before we’re asked to live them for real.
Want to see what this looks like when an idea becomes a world?
The Dazzling Wilds is an evolving story world designed for imagination, reflection, and meaningful creative practice.
The Concept Gallery invites you to peek behind the scenes:
Where did the idea come from?
How is the world is being built?
What am I discovering about the relationship between imagination and real life?
My Story
I’m the author of the From Sadie’s Sketchbook middle grade series and Spilled Ink: A Writer’s Activity Book, and the founder of Society of Young Inklings, a nonprofit that helps young writers develop their voices through mentorship, community, and creative practice.
For more than twenty years, I’ve worked at the intersection of story, imagination, learning, and creative development, as a writer, teaching artist, facilitator, program designer, and organizational leader.
Across books, workshops, learning experiences, and the worlds I build, I keep exploring how imagination can change what we notice, what we understand, and what we believe might be possible.
Bring this way of thinking to your team.
I design and facilitate imaginative, story-based experiences for organizations, teams, schools, and communities navigating change, developing creative capacity, or exploring how they want to work together.