Sharon is a founding board member and architect of School House for Reimagination. She co-facilitates the Creative Incubator Program and serves as Lead for the Wellness and Retreat Program.
Sharon Linezo Hong
Her work centers on creating spaces for deeper learning through self- inquiry, exploration, and meaningful connection, drawing from her leadership experiences in documentary filmmaking, progressive education, and holistic wellness.
A lifelong student, Sharon earned her B.A. from Brandeis University and pursued continuing education classes at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Harvard Extension School, and Boston College’s Lynch School of Education. She holds certifications in healing traditions, including Traditional Thai Massage, Usui Reiki, and Western Massage Therapy. Her yoga practice began in her early twenties with Wade Maraj, then decades later she completed her 200-hour yoga teacher training with URU Yoga and Beyond and is continuing advanced training with Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health.
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Through her studies across institutions, folk traditions, and nature itself, Sharon has come to view the ‘School House within’ as the ultimate site of transformative knowledge. She believes real learning occurs when we move beyond simply following a teacher to instead integrating and embodying the teachings themselves. Sharon is dedicated to supporting others as they remember and trust their own inner wisdom and creative authenticity.
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Mercedes is a founding member of the School House for Reimagination. She co-facilitates the Creative Incubator and serves as Lead of the Arts and Retreat Program.
Mercedes Autumn
Her work serves as a guidepost to creativity as a lifelong discipline, one that strengthens personal agency and cultivates community. At the heart of her philosophy is the belief that creativity is a circle we step into again and again: a return to presence and curiosity, the quiet spark that lives within each of us.
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Mercedes earned her B.A. in Art History from the University of Florida, then deepened her hands-on practice as Studio Manager and Pottery Instructor at the Arts Center of the Capital Region in Troy, New York. During this time, she also taught ceramics at Hudson Valley Community College and served as promotions and event coordination for the Troy Waterfront Farmers Market, fostering local culture, connection, and creative commerce. Returning home to the Gulf Coast, she founded Full Circle Gallery in Fort Walton Beach, a collaborative art space devoted to exhibition, shared learning, and accessible creative practice.
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The School House for Reimagination is the natural continuation of this lifelong arc: a place where creativity is tended like a flame, where community forms through making, and where people are invited to return to themselves through creative inquiry, embodied craftsmanship, and the development of imaginative practice. Her work in both clay and community is a living circle of return, remembrance, and creative becoming.
In their earliest years together, Sharon and Mercedes were drawn to one another by a shared instinct—a seeking nature, a longing for something deeper than the fragmentation and noise of traditional public schooling. As teenagers, they slipped away from classrooms and into the quiet refuge of Blackwater Forest, following the winding banks of Coldwater Creek to a world where they could learn how to be.
Among trees, reading aloud to each other or simply listening to the creek’s unbroken babble, they discovered a sense of presence that schooling had never offered. Covered in clay, meditating in the sun at the river’s edge, they remembered the ancient connection between body, earth, and spirit. These woods became their first teacher—guiding them toward stillness, sovereignty, and a sense of oneness interwoven with independence. It was there they learned the medicine of silence in a loud world, their first lessons in duality and belonging.
From those formative experiences, their paths unfolded in complementary ways. Mercedes followed the pull of earth and clay, cultivating a lifelong devotion to working with natural materials and collaborating directly with the land. Sharon followed synchronicities and intuition, weaving her lifelong study of Self in all of her spirit-led endeavors of being a holistic practitioner, documentary storyteller, and educational leader.
Decades later, as they enter a new phase of life, the desire to share what shaped them has grown into School House 4 Reimagination. Their work in embodied arts and earth-based practice is an offering born of those early days on the creek—a desire to help others reconnect with the quiet, spontaneous, unstructured presence that continues to guide them.
School House 4 Reimagination is their way of returning to the genesis of their learning: a touchstone for the true self, a guidepost back to equilibrium, and a space where like-minded souls can rediscover the medicine of the Earth and reimagine the power of simply being.
