Michael Ventura

Michael Ventura is an author and teacher whose work centres on empathy and purpose, and on the older healing ways that sit underneath them. For close to twenty years he ran Sub Rosa, a strategy and design studio in New York, where he developed methods for putting empathy to practical use with organisations such as the ACLU, Google and the United Nations. That work became his 2018 book Applied Empathy, and his second book, Constellation Thinking, due in January 2027, treats purpose as a set of related pursuits rather than one fixed goal. He has taught as visiting faculty at Princeton, West Point and Michigan's Ross School of Business.

Alongside this he has kept a private practice for more than a decade under the name Corvus Medicine. He trained in qigong with Master Yuwen Ru and in the curanderismo of the Nahua peoples of Mexico with the curandera Doña Leova, and his sessions pair qigong with the limpia, a ritual cleansing, sometimes adding plants, sound and crystals. As an ordained minister he also holds ceremonies for births, marriages, homes and the dying. At Esalen in Big Sur he leads weekend workshops on these folk traditions with Margaret Harrsen. He is board president of the Tribal Link Foundation, which supports Indigenous leaders, and writes a Substack on empathy and meaning.