Founders

Rayshell Chambers

Co-Founder and Co-Executive Director

Rayshell Chambers was born to serve! With a bachelor degree in Sociology and Masters of Public Administration, she has dedicated both her personal and professional pursuits to acquiring knowledge and skills to solve some of the most complex public policy issues impacting the human condition. Her professional interests include workforce development, specifically related to social enterprise development and social justice education and advocacy. This had led to a professional career in women’s rights advocacy movement and non-profit grant writing and capacity building. When Rayshell is not thinking about how to save the world, she enjoys watching NBA basketball and volunteering developing social enterprise programs like the Painted Brain’s new business and employment project, Honest Enterprise.

Dave Leon

Co-Founder and Co-Executive Director

Dave Leon is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and Founding Director of Painted Brain. He has extensive social work practice experience in group homes, homeless shelters, hospitals, community mental health centers, and college counseling centers for close to 20 years.

He started Painted Brain with members of an art group at Didi Hirsch in 2004. Five original members of this art group are still active participants in Painted Brain.

The Painted Brain is a community of mental health activists using media and the arts to change the discussion about mental illness. He recognized early in his career that the mental health system fails to provide the most important aspect of mental health and recovery, a sense of community. He has worked tirelessly for more than a decade building the dynamic, creative community of artists and activists that is Painted Brain.

Dave went on to work as a staff therapist at UCLA’s Student Counseling Center before devoting himself to the development of Painted Brain full-time beginning in 2012. He has provided ten thousand hours of individual therapy, learning that for people both with and without serious mental illness relationships to other people are almost always of primary importance when helping a person live a better life, regardless of diagnosis. Dave continues to sharpen his clinical skills as the clinical group supervisor to the social work team at Step Up On Second and as a therapist in private practice.

Dave is driven in his work with Painted Brain by a vision of a world in which mental illness is truly accepted as one more aspect of the beautiful tapestry of difference that binds us together as humans. Based in the literature on attachment theory, the Painted Brain was conceived as an attachment object, a point of shared connection for a potential community. Now he is shifting focus to build the community center to house the vision.

David “Eli” Israelian

Co-Founder

David “Eli” Israelian is the co-founder of Painted Brain. He’s developed Painted Brain’s online face as well as many of its programs including the CodiePie Coding Workshop. He’s the CEO and founder of CodiePie, a tech company that specializes in CMS and Custom Plugin Development, as well as the MarQ Hub for cloud apps. His passion for social justice and innovation in technology has led him to bridge CodiePie and Painted Brain through the Painted Brain Academy, providing coding and computer literacy workshops, focused on strength development, purpose, and productivity as one sector of their supportive recovery program.

Painted Brain has operated on a service-oriented business model. For much of its history, the project ran with volunteer mental health consumers and social work interns under the supervision of the founding director Dave Leon, building an arts community. Through the internship, Painted Brain developed an effective model for art group interventions for psychiatric populations that have been shown to increase connection and trust and to decrease anxiety.

One of his primary goals for 2018 is to establish multiple coding workshops running in various IMDs/psyche facilities as a means to accelerate mental health recovery. Each coding workshop will have a revolving enrollment program and teach the very basics of HTML 4.0, XHTML, HTML5, CSS, and Jquery. For more advanced members coding in Javascript, NodeJS, AngularJS, PHP, Java, C#, he runs separate workshops along with one on one sessions.
CodiePie – https://www.codiepie.com