MONA LEE RAY
“MonaTheRaven” is an author, performer, artist, and world-builder whose work has never been particularly interested in staying in one medium.
Her practice moves between writing, painting, movement, film, performance, and whatever else a story demands. Raised in a military family and accustomed to moving from place to place, Mona learned early to build worlds wherever she landed. Art was her first language, long before she thought to call it a career.
She has also always been a little spooky.
Spirituality lives throughout her work—in her relationship with intuition, her years of reading tarot, and the attention she gives to dreams, symbols, and the stories we carry beneath the ones we tell. Making art and tending to her inner life have always been intertwined. Both offer ways to ask questions, find meaning, and sit with what doesn’t arrive with an explanation.
Mona has quite literally always been doing some version of what you see her doing today: making art, telling stories, moving bodies, reading energy, and finding strange little ways to weave them together. These days, that includes guided meditations that invite others into imagined spaces for rest, reflection, and creative possibility.
That instinct takes many forms: ravens, strange creatures, haunted places, magical characters, dreamscapes, fractured figures, and the occasional thing that probably followed her home. Her stories and visual art wander through the surreal, supernatural, and unsettling, with room for beauty, humor, tenderness, and wonder. She is especially drawn to the in-between: beauty and decay, reality and imagination, tenderness and violence, who we were and whatever we are becoming.
Over more than a decade, she has written and published books, created visual art, worked in film and performance, and taught creative storytelling while encouraging others to trust their own artistic instincts. As a Filipina artist and mother of three, she continues to make space for a creative and spiritual life within the demands, interruptions, and small revelations of the everyday.
She still doesn’t know what to put in the little box that asks for her occupation.
Storyteller seems to fit for now.
Interested in collaborating? Hit BOOK ME in the menu.
Press
CanvasRebel Magazine Interview:
Women We’ve Been Waiting For | YouTube Video Interview with Alix Lebec:
Finding Her Courage Podcast Episode:
https://open.spotify.com/episode/0BLpeNuTxCNaGkYAmPxkGi?si=78_TPsuYQKmQzdXUID8Xbw
Step inside my Patreon 🎧
Making art can feel a little like building a strange world alone in a quiet room. Patreon is where I open the door and invite you inside.
Here, you’ll find early chapters, exclusive audiobooks, notes from my writing desk, and glimpses of stories taking shape—from Norah Wolfe’s universe to the worlds I haven’t introduced yet. You’ll also find my growing collection of guided meditations for rest, imagination, and reconnecting with your own creative life.
It’s a little like visiting my studio: manuscripts on the desk, something strange taking shape in the corner, and a quiet place waiting for you by the window. Come for the stories, stay for a meditation, or spend a little time with the messy, magical process behind it all.
Your support helps me make room for this work within the fullness of motherhood and everyday life—to keep writing, creating, recording, and sharing what comes next.