Some people bring color into a room.
Erica brings movement.
Her energy has something wonderfully sparky about it. She’s curious, expressive, quick to smile, and somehow capable of making the people around her feel like something interesting is about to happen.
I originally met Erica through a screen. We were working together to develop the digital branding for Urban Curry Consulting, and we kept getting stuck on one deceptively simple question:
What are Erica’s colors?
Eventually, we stopped looking at color palettes on a computer and started looking at birds.
That’s how we found the American Redstart.
How We Met
Erica and I met through my work as a digital designer and much of our relationship existed through emails, texts, Zoom calls, ideas, and pixels. As we worked together, though, we discovered a shared interest in my Michigan bird project. Our branding conversations started becoming conversations about identity. Instead of asking only which colors looked good together on a website, we started asking which colors actually felt like Erica.
It was wonderful getting to know her through all those digital exchanges, but meeting her in person was completely different. Suddenly I could see the grin. The movement. The curiosity. The way her smile sparks up her whole face. There are things you simply can’t discover about someone from behind a screen.
Sometimes you have to watch them move.
Who She Is
Erica is difficult to describe with a single title.
She’s a changemaker, strategist, facilitator, designer, improviser, adoptee advocate, community connector, freestyle swimmer, and Airbnb Superhost.
She’s also the founder and principal of Urban Curry Consulting, where she and her team help changemakers turn big visions into meaningful action. They help leaders implement their ideas, accomplish their missions, and increasingly explore how AI technology can support that work.
That feels very Erica.
She connects people and ideas. She helps create movement where something has become stuck. She seems naturally interested in the question:
What could this become?
But our conversations about branding also uncovered something much more personal.
Erica told me that, as an adoptee, she had often felt like a chameleon. She became very good at adapting to the people around her, but it took much longer to understand who she was.
That journey included years of searching and multiple court battles to change the law so she could access her original birth certificate. Finding herself wasn’t abstract. She fought for the right to know where she came from. Now much of her work centers on helping other people find themselves, too.
Why the Redstart
When I suggested the American Redstart, Erica immediately started researching. Something clicked.
American Redstarts are tiny, animated warblers that rarely seem to sit still. They dart through trees, spread their tails, droop their wings, and reveal sudden flashes of orange against black.
Those flashes aren’t just beautiful. Redstarts use their movement and contrasting patches of color to startle insects from vegetation before pursuing them. Erica loved that.
She described the bird as expressive and animated, flashing unexpected bursts of color and stirring up its surroundings. That’s Erica.
Her energy creates movement. She asks questions. She makes connections. She helps people reconsider what they thought was fixed. And perhaps my favorite connection is that the Redstart’s brilliant color becomes especially noticeable when it moves.
After years of feeling like she needed to adapt herself to the people around her, there was something powerful about photographing Erica as a bird whose colors become more visible the more freely it moves.
The Look
We built Erica’s American Redstart entirely from flowing rayon pieces in Raven Black and Pagoda Orange.
A hand-sewn Raven Black rayon jersey top created the base. We tied one Raven Black Festival Wrap as a skirt, then transformed a Pagoda Orange Festival Wrap into a vest. Another Raven Black wrap draped around her neck, giving us fabric to play with as she moved, while a small Pagoda Orange bracelet added one last flash of color.
The palette’s simplicity made it powerful.
Raven Black created a dramatic foundation, while Pagoda Orange appeared in unexpected flashes—just like the bright patches revealed when a male American Redstart opens its wings and tail.
And Erica came alive in these colors.
The orange felt especially right. As I spent more time at her home, I started noticing sparks of that same vibrant orange throughout the space she’d created.
It was already there.
And then I’d look at Erica and see it again.
That same fire was in her eyes.
Maybe we begin choosing our colors long before we consciously recognize them as ours.
The Session
We photographed around Beachwood Retreats, the home Erica has created near Muskegon Lake and Pere Marquette Beach. The space itself says a lot about her. It was custom-designed as a place to relax, recharge, and recalibrate, surrounded by opportunities to play and reconnect with nature. We started near the pickleball courts and slowly meandered toward the beach. Along the way, Erica showed me a tree that had become important to her when they first moved there.
It was sturdy. Grounded. Unmoving. I loved that this incredibly animated Redstart had found comfort in something so still.
Because we need both. We need the parts of ourselves that flash and dance and stir things up, and we need somewhere to return when we want to become quiet again.
As we moved toward the beach, I watched Erica become increasingly comfortable with the camera. The grin appeared. Her movement got bigger. The fabric began to fly, and those little flashes of Pagoda Orange kept appearing between all that Raven Black.
There she was. The Redstart.
I love watching that moment happen through my camera—the point when someone stops thinking quite so much about being photographed and starts playing.
Afterward, Erica generously invited me to stay and experience Beachwood Retreats for myself. I spent an hour enjoying the space she’d created and left feeling completely recharged. That felt fitting, too. Erica doesn’t just talk about creating change and well-being. She creates spaces where others can experience it.
Color Connection
Pagoda Orange feels like Erica’s spark. It’s energetic, creative, warm, curious, and difficult to contain. Like the flashes on the Redstart’s wings and tail, it becomes especially powerful when it’s in motion. It’s the color of the grin that spreads across her face when an idea catches fire.
Raven Black gives that energy definition. It’s confident and grounding, creating the contrast that makes every flash of orange even brighter. It reminds me of Erica’s strategic side—the structure underneath all that improvisation, curiosity, and movement.
Together, the colors feel like two sides of the same person: strategy and spontaneity, depth and delight, grounding and sparks.
What I love most is that we didn’t really give Erica these colors.
We discovered them.
Pagoda Orange was already scattered throughout her home. It was already present in the warmth and energy she creates around other people. It was already there in that unmistakable spark in her eyes.
We just put it on her body and watched what happened.
Finding Your Colors
Erica and I started this process trying to choose colors for a brand.
Instead, we ended up talking about identity.
That feels important.
When you’ve spent much of your life adapting to the people around you, asking What are my colors? can become a much bigger question.
What do I actually like? What feels good in my body? What parts of myself have I muted? What happens when I stop choosing based on how other people might respond?
Erica described herself as a chameleon.
There’s enormous strength in being able to adapt, but perhaps there comes a point when adaptation stops being the goal.
You get to decide what stays.
You get to discover what was yours all along.
You get to flash your own colors.
Watching Erica blossom in front of my camera, then returning to the question of how she should blossom online, reminded me why I love this project so much.
Maybe finding your colors isn’t always about choosing something new.
Sometimes it’s about noticing the colors you’ve been leaving clues about all along.
Join the Flock
Power Portraits are becoming an exploration of more than birds.
They’re about color, identity, movement, nature, and the strange process of becoming recognizable to ourselves.
Sometimes your bird reflects who you’ve always been. Sometimes it shows you something you’re growing toward. And sometimes a tiny bird flashing orange through the trees helps you answer a question you’ve been trying to solve on a computer screen.
What are your colors?
Let’s find out together.
