About

Multi-hyphenate, Susan Ruth began her career as a performing artist and songwriter in Seattle, Washington, where she garnered multiple performance and writing awards for her albums how to say goodbye and Surfacing to Breathe, and served on the NARAS (Recording Academ/ Grammy) Board of Governors as a Songwriter Governor. 

In 2006, she moved to Nashville, Tennessee, penning songs in multiple genres, including: pop, country, rock, AC and Euro dance for artists such as Reba McEntire, Lonestar, Erdem Kinay, O'Shea and The United, among others. In 2014, she released her fourth studio album All I Ever Wanted Was Everything. Susan’s songs have been featured in film and television.

An accomplished, self-taught abstract painter, Susan is the third generation grand-niece of renowned painter Carl Gutherz, a notable member of the American Symbolist movement. Susan's works are vibrant, intuitive color fields that play with form and texture and are collected around the world.

In July of 2016, Susan founded and began hosting the human interest, purpose-driven, Hey Human podcast. It has since gained momentum and world-wide attention for its open-minded conversations ranging in topics from science, technology, religion, art, economics and politics to humanism, philosophy, gender, and race.

Susan has keynoted, moderated, and paneled on topics of creativity, crowd-funding, empowerment, communication, independent music, story, humanism, adversity, and finding one's voice for; Act Like a Girrrl, New Millennium Music Conference, FEMMUSIC, Union College, Seattle Film Summit, the Tennessee Higher Education Initiative, MusiCares, RADD, Pujols Family Foundation, and Sunrise Children Services.

She recently wrote, directed, and produced her multi-award-winning first short film, "The First," and is in pre-production for her first feature, “Pleasure,” as writer and director. 

She’s working on her debut poetry collection, as well as a collection of essays. 

Susan resides in Los Angeles, California.

Rachel Kice is a multidisciplinary artist working in painting, writing, installation, and performance. Her practice centers on creativity as a transformative force—how making shapes both self and reality. She is a Certified Clinical Hypnotherapist and is a graduate of the OWC program (creative writing) through Stanford University’s Dept of Continuing Studies. 

Based in the Pike National Forest in Colorado since 2024, she is developing Shapes of Earth, a new series of abstract paintings and objects made in dialogue with her novel-in-progress. Many of the works are created directly on the forest floor, incorporating snow, dirt, and found materials. The series began as an experiment: to write a protagonist who painted differently than she did. To understand that character, Kice began painting as the character might—and over time, the boundary between fiction and self dissolved. The story and paintings now evolve together.

Kice first gained recognition for her expressive live-painting performances with Nashville’s artist collective MuzikMafia, sharing the stage with Big & Rich, Gretchen Wilson, and other major American musicians. Her paintings are included in public and private collections such as the Tennessee State Museum, Warner Brothers, Sony, Berklee College of Music, and CAA. She has also collaborated with TEDx, MUSICARES, Emerson University’s Center for Contemplative Science and Compassion-Based Ethics, and Crocs/Hey Dude.

In 2021, her Oracle of Associated Light—a card deck and guidebook based on abstract word paintings—was selected as a Kickstarter “Project We Love.” The project bridged her visual and literary work and offered a tool for creative reflection and lateral thinking.

Kice shares her process through short-form videos on Instagram (@rachelkice)—some raw, some funny, always tied to her ongoing investigation of art, meaning, and emotion.

When not making art, she’s likely off-path in the woods.