LAURIE
MARIA
KEMP

About Me

about

I’m a writer, entrepreneur and therapist in training. What connects it all are two questions: What does it mean to become more fully yourself? And how might you offer that self in service to others and the world?

I write. I guide people through the hardest passages of their inner lives. I sit with founders in crisis or hypergrowth, and couples in freefall. The work changes shape, but the territory does not: what we carry, what we suppress and what becomes possible when we stop performing and start connecting. 

We live in a culture that prizes independence above almost everything else. But in my experiencewhether in therapy or in the organisations we help our clients buildthe most transformative moments happen in relation. Businesses live or die by it, and also healing is rarely a private affair.

That’s what I love most about art, too. Art reaches across silence, across time, across the distance between you and I. And in doing so, it dissolves the illusion that we were ever truly apart.

Experience

Starting my career at THNK, I’ve spent the past 13 years developing leadership programs, retreats and change trajectories for +400 tech leaders, entrepreneurs and VC investors.

After launching Upshot Impact in 2020, I co-founded FABRIC in 2026, through which we help scale-ups create thriving leadership dynamics and organisational cultures. 

Over the past decade, I’ve immersed myself in psychoanalysis, individuation and mythology, i.e. anything written by Marion Woodman, James Hollis, Peter Kingsley and Carl Jung. This led me training to become an Integrative Psychotherapist (EAP accredited) at the Educatieve Academie in Antwerp, which takes an experiential and client-centred approach to therapy. Next to trauma work, I guide couples as a relationship therapist.

Creative work

My art explores love, longing, womanhood and the pursuit of inner truth. I recently completed Sophia’s Tears, a collection of 28 poems and illustrations about reclaiming one’s voice and body.

I am currently finishing a novel, Het leven is geen ponykamp, a coming-of-age story about Gaia, a teenage girl, whose mother disappears in Colombia, and what remains of a family when the person at its centre leaves.

I was born in Maastricht, the Netherlands in 1991. After years of globetrotting, I happily call Amsterdam home.

contact

lauriemariakemp@gmail.com

Poem of the week

Every Sunday morning, I send a poem and matching painting to friends and family. If you’d like to receive these, you can subscribe to Sophia’s Whispers via the button on the right.