Rebekah

Rebekah spent years insisting she wasn’t an entrepreneur. She was just teaching watercolor.

Painting began as a creative outlet while she was home raising three kids after working as a marriage and family therapist. Then she taught a watercolor workshop at a school fundraiser, and something clicked. It brought together art, community, and the facilitation skills she already loved. Workshops followed. Eventually there was an LLC, marketing budgets, sold-out events—and the reluctant realization: “I totally am an entrepreneur.”

That instinct to make room for someone else’s dream is familiar to Rebekah. Early in her marriage, she worked and went to graduate school while supporting the household as her husband built his company from the ground up. Years later, when cancer entered their lives, the balance shifted. He scaled back work and travel to be present for Rebekah and their three kids—the latest turn in a marriage shaped by taking turns carrying more when the other needs it.

By early 2025, just as Rebekah was questioning what came next, Anthropologie unexpectedly invited her to teach as a resident artist in Palo Alto. The opportunity felt like everything she had been working toward.

Then she was diagnosed with breast cancer.

What followed included chemotherapy, hair loss, major surgery, and reconstruction. Yet while her body was being asked to slow down, her creative life kept expanding. She continued teaching, sometimes without mentioning cancer at all. She was there, she says, “to teach art and bring joy and beauty” to the people she gathered with.

Cancer did change something in her, though.

“I called this my badass era.”

For Rebekah, that didn’t mean pretending treatment wasn’t painful or frightening. It meant deciding what she wanted to share, how she wanted to show up, and eventually realizing she didn’t need to make her shaved head—or her experience—more comfortable for anyone else.

“I don’t have to soften it.”

She is a less apologetic version of someone who was already there.