Our Team
Ariana Turner, PhD
Co-Founder
As a child, Ariana loved nothing more than telling herself stories. She would camp out at the kitchen table, happily telling herself the latest chapter of the book in her head and filling stacks of journals with half-finished drawings of each unfolding scene.
Little has changed in adulthood. When she took a college course called The Life Story and had the opportunity to interview an 80-year-old named John, Ariana saw the stoic man weep upon hearing his story shared at the end of the semester. At that moment, she understood the power of stories to change lives. She decided then to devote her career to life stories.
She received her PhD in personality psychology and MS in clinical psychology from Northwestern University, where she studied narrative identity. For the last three years, she worked on story-driven learning at Georgia Tech, where she taught The Art of Telling Your Story to engineering undergraduates and researched how the power of story impacts student outcomes. Her mixed-methods research has been published in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Journal of Engineering Education, Journal of Research in Personality, Narrative Inquiry, and others. As a lover of all forms of story, she is also currently working on her debut novel.
Reva Johnson, PhD
Co-Founder
Reva grew up building Lego models of Olympic events with her siblings, checking out armfuls of books from the library, collecting favorite phrases in notebooks, and playing soccer. She studied mechanical engineering, where she ran into an insurmountable problem. It seemed like all the mechanical engineers around her could fix their own cars, and that this was a requirement for being a good engineer. Reva did not care about cars – at all – and that was nearly the end of this story.
But then she realized: the coolest engineering system was the human body. So, in grad school, she studied biomedical engineering at Northwestern University, where she worked on prosthetics and neuroscience at the Center for Bionic Medicine in the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab. She still collected favorite words – and felt pulled to write poetry – but didn't pursue it until two things happened: she spent a year learning from spoken-word poets in the DC area, and she experienced a story-driven learning workshop.
At that workshop, surrounded by engineering deans and department chairs, Reva tentatively told Janece Shaffer that she writes poetry sometimes. Janece's response: "you're a poet." And in that room full of engineers, that statement wasn't just accepted – it was celebrated. The story reframe stuck: she realized she could be an engineer AND a poet. One was not exclusive to the other.
These days, Reva is an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Bioengineering at Valparaiso University. She is an Associate Editor-in-Chief of the Assistive Technology journal and a published poet. Most days you can probably find her running on trails in the Indiana Dunes with her two kids biking alongside.