Kira Shemesh

My career started right out of college when I worked on a study for recall and cognition for Alzheimer's patients, which is where I started my love for working with the elderly. I then worked as an activity director at a nursing home for about 13 years, but it became a lot about paperwork and not so much hands-on work. So I went back to school and got a certification to become a chair yoga instructor, quit my full-time job, and started my own business. Now I have 8 instructors underneath me, and we teach about 90 classes a month at surrounding nursing homes. During a typical day, I'll teach two classes myself while there's usually about 12 classes a day on the calendar, and the rest of my day is doing billing for my staff, reaching out to facilities to make sure everything's going okay, and teaching people how to become chair yoga instructors. I'm also an artist - during COVID about 6 years ago, I picked up a paintbrush for the first time since college and started doing Fluid Art. It just kind of went crazy from there. I've sold about 800 paintings, was able to do an artist in residency at a school where I taught 400 children how to do fluid art, and I've been commissioned at several different banks where I'm their artist that does their art every time they open a new bank. I work on commissions in the afternoon in my art studio at home.