Leigh Hopkins
6 Courses • 1 StudentBiography
Leigh Hopkins is a writer, editor, and cultural changemaker. She is the director and founder of Viva Institute, an educational platform advancing creativity, consciousness, and cultural repair through transformative courses, personal guidance, and a community that gets it.
Leigh is the creator of The 3.5% Project, an ongoing documentation of Harvard professor Gene Sharp’s “198 Methods of Nonviolent Action,” offering practical tools for those engaged in social change work. Leigh works as a communications consultant for grassroots political campaigns, with the goal of electing more LGBTQ+ candidates to political office.
As curator and editor of KHÔRA Magazine—a dynamic online arts space produced in collaboration with Lidia Yuknavitch’s Corporeal Writing—Leigh showcases polyphonic, multi-genre writers and artists pushing creative boundaries.
She offers 1:1 Sessions for navigating transitions, uncovering creative blocks, and charting life paths, as well as trauma-informed, body-centered writing instruction and editorial coaching for writers at all stages.
Leigh’s writing has appeared in BOMB Magazine, Longreads, McSweeney’s, and The Rumpus, among others, spanning essays, political commentary, memoir, fiction, and in-depth arts and culture interviews. After the publication of her essay The Brazilian Healer and the Patron Saint of Impossible Causes (Longreads), she was featured in a Brazilian documentary by the film crew who first exposed the crimes of John of God, the world’s most famous “spiritual surgeon.”
In 2010, Leigh left a career in social policy to move to Brazil, where she founded an online institute by rigging a satellite dish to a boulder in a banana field. Before that, she led the design, development, and implementation of the after-school literacy program Youth Education for Tomorrow, which was referenced by President Obama in the New York Times as an example of what’s possible in community-based institutions. As Vice President for Education of a leading social policy think tank, she provided support to 500 literacy programs in historically underserved communities throughout the United States.
Today, Leigh lives in Philadelphia. Feel free to send her an email at info@vivainstitute.com or find her on Instagram.
