Founder/Executive Director: Mary Lynn Fitton
Co-Director San Mateo Program (at the Youth Services Center and Margaret J. Kemp Camp for Girls)
Mary Lynn’s journey to creating The Art of Yoga Project came through years of work in health care and yoga instruction and a lifelong focus on mental and physical health for women. Mary Lynn received her Masters in Science and Family Nurse Practitioner degree at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) in 1994. She has worked in a variety of family practice and women’s health settings including two university health centers, the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic, and Planned Parenthood. During her work as both a nurse and nurse practitioner, Mary Lynn paid particular attention to the underlying issues beneath an individual’s health concerns and the connection between spiritual and physical well-being.
Mary Lynn began teaching yoga in 1998 after completing the White Lotus Yoga
Instructor Certification Program in Santa Barbara. She began instructing young girls in East Palo Alto, CA and Ashland, OR, and experienced first-hand the power of yoga in helping girls identify and address their physical and emotional issues. Mary Lynn created The Art of Yoga Project in 2002, which combined yoga with creative arts, to bring together two powerful forces that had shaped her own development as a woman: creative writing and yoga. Convinced that young girls would benefit from exposure to art and yoga, Mary Lynn began designing a program to teach girls yoga’s eight-fold path and help them recognize the power of art and mindful movement, hoping to negate the habits of excess drugs and alcohol use, unhealthy dieting, self-mutilation, depression and anxiety. Almost four years after starting the Art of Yoga Project, Mary Lynn is gratified to see the Project’s effects for at-risk girls and is excited about the future of the organization.
Mary Lynn lives in Palo Alto, CA, with her husband, John, and two children, Jack (7) and Ellie (5).