Exquisite Knowing is an audacious, early-stage, service company founded by Ashley David, MFA/PhD. With more than 20 years of R&D driving the creation of exceptional tools and services, we power people to empower themselves and others, holistically.
We’re conscious, optimistic, smart, and compassionate. We believe theory and practice have seats at the table, but they aren’t the same thing.
We define innovation in terms of diversity and inclusivity, and our business is manifesting elegant and surprising ways to help our customers and constituencies solve burning questions–both human and planetary.
We’re intrepidly fathoming the depths. We’re hungry to raise our own bar. Every day. Conscious democratic participation rocks our world.
Be audacious. Reach out, and let us know how we can support you to empower yourself and others. We look forward to hearing from you.
Our Team
Founder, Ashley David, MFA/PhD earned degrees from Stanford University, New York University, University of Michigan, and The University of Georgia, and she has lived and worked on four continents in fields as diverse as tech, financial services, higher education, K-12, marketing, diversity & inclusion, sail training and oceanographic research, filmmaking, and art. Exquisite Knowing emerged from this diverse landscape as a system and suite of tools to explore and solve for questions related to social, economic, and environmental justice and sustainability.
Using EK tools and frames in combination with anthropological training, creativity practice, and perspective cultivated across diverse industries, sectors, and cultural contexts, Ashley empowers clients to close the gap between mission statements and on-the-ground experience and deliverables. She partners with clients to tweak systems, structures, and everyday practices so they can deploy frameworks and tools that yield micro-empowerment that accrues and catalyze mutual and reciprocal exchange. Transformation follows with paradigm-shifting successes that reflect constituent priorities equitably and raise the bar for everything from learning to leading, communicating to community-making.
Ashley is based in New Mexico, where, in addition to her work with Exquisite Knowing, she is exploring the intersection of indigeneity, wilderness, sustainability, and belonging along the Rio Grande from its headwaters in the San Juan mountains of Colorado to the Gulf of Mexico at Brownsville, Texas. Poetry, prose, and project-based art have appeared in publications including: Web Conjunctions, Hyperallergic, The Offending Adam, Black Sun Lit, Alimentum, The Greensboro Review, Hanging Loose, Michigan Quarterly Review, Mid-American Review, The Southern Review, Verse, and Women’s Studies Quarterly. Scholarship has been anthologized, and she has performed and installed work in locations across the U.S. and overseas.
Anti-bias facilitator, Sarah Hollingsworth, is a scientist, educator, and complex-systems thinker who advocates for intersectional social justice, decolonization, and climate justice. She views anti-bias education as a vital foundation for collective liberation and healing, and she supports individuals’ and institutions’ efforts to hold themselves accountable as they catalyze meaningful change.
Using concrete frameworks and shared vocabulary, Sarah partners with clients to co-create and apply anti-bias practices sustainably as they navigate identity formation and tackle systems of oppression. She firmly believes that this work must not stay in our heads; it must also transform our hearts and move our feet to action, and she supports clients to disrupt patterns of intellectualizing, perfectionism, and performance in favor of authentic community-making.
Born in Texas and raised in New Jersey, Sarah is based in California, where she is active within her local Showing Up For Racial Justice (SURJ) chapter, working to uproot white supremacy. Additionally, she has co-created curriculum for adolescent identity development in K-12 settings; facilitated employee diversity and equity training; and presented at conferences for the Progressive Education Network and the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS), where she served four years as staff for the Student Diversity Leadership Conference. In all her work, Sarah honors and takes her lead from social justice pioneers both past and present.
Exquisite Knowing 