Meet our founder

Speaker, Studio Founder, Joy Coach, Artist, Air Force Veteran, and the woman who packed a banana costume to Mexico and accidentally started a global movement.

Hi, I'm Lina. Joy is my thing.

I'm an artist, founder of Joy Lab Ceramics Thousand Oaks, and a Joy Coach with over a decade of experience helping people break free from burnout and build lives, communities, and organizations filled with meaning, flow, and fulfillment.

I've brought joy to teams at Amazon, to leaders across industries, and now to every human who walks through the Joy Lab doors with muddy hands and an open heart.

Woman with blonde hair wearing a purple t-shirt with graphic print, sitting against a red background, smiling, with one hand near her face and tattoos visible on her arm.

I didn't choose joy. I had to build it from scratch.

Born in Denmark, raised in Boise, Idaho — creativity was my first language. My mom ran a Scandinavian furniture store steeped in hygge and beauty. My dad was a musician who taught me that a song could move a room. I grew up understanding, almost instinctively, that art and connection weren't luxuries. They were how humans stayed whole.

Then I joined the Air Force, and somewhere between the structure and the striving, I stopped being whole.

In 2007, stationed at Sheppard Air Force Base and in the middle of a health crisis, I read a book that cracked me open. The idea was radical at the time: I could create my life instead of surviving one that felt completely inauthentic. I divorced, left the military, moved to Seattle with my three-year-old son, and started the messy, humbling work of figuring out who I actually was.

Seven years at Amazon taught me that joy is a strategy.

By 2012, my path had taken an unexpected turn: I was hired at Amazon as a Strategic Workspace Planning Program Manager — a role that somehow needed all of me at once. Furniture knowledge, Air Force HR experience, personal development instincts, and an unusual capacity for chaos.

For seven years, I traveled, built programs, and became the unofficial Chief Fun Officer. Inter-team karaoke competitions. Beaver Time. The Magnum PI Secret Society of Amazon Corporate. These weren't side projects — they were proof that human connection, play, and a little absurdity could transform even the most high-pressure environment.

What I learned there still drives everything I do: culture isn't built from the top. It's built in the small, genuine moments between people.

A smiling woman wearing a navy beanie and a red scarf stands on a busy city sidewalk with tall buildings and a police vehicle in the background.

COVID gave me a baby, a burnout, and a lump of clay.

In 2020, at home with a newborn during a global pandemic, I hit a wall I hadn't seen coming. The lifelong pursuit of self-improvement had become its own trap. I was on a hamster wheel of becoming — and I'd completely forgotten how to just be.

I enrolled in the Bachelor of Arts program at California Lutheran University and took every class I could. But it was ceramics that stopped me cold.

From the first moment my hands were in clay, something shifted. Not productivity. Not performance. Just presence — me, the material, and the moment. I watched classmates open up around the worktable in ways that no seminar or course had ever produced. Clay was doing something deeper than making.

By graduation in 2022, I knew: this wasn't just an art form. It was the thing I'd been building toward.

A woman wearing a mask leaning on a table with white ceramic cups, in a pottery studio with shelves of paint buckets and tools in the background.

Be the banana.

In 2017, heartbroken after a breakup, I packed a yellow banana costume for a trip to Mexico on an impulse. Three days in, I threw it on, walked to the beach, and jumped into the waves.

Something broke open. Amid the sadness, I felt genuine, unfiltered joy — the messy, freeing kind you can't manufacture. A friend asked to wear it next. Then another. Then strangers on the beach.

Since then, over 300 people from the US, Japan, Germany, Australia, and beyond have said yes to being the banana — dancing, laughing, and dropping the armor of looking good for exactly one ridiculous, liberating moment.

The banana isn't a gimmick. It's the whole philosophy. Joy and mess coexist. Playfulness is radical. And sometimes the most transformative thing you can do is look absolutely ridiculous in the waves.

Would you say yes to the banana?

Person on the beach wearing a bright yellow banana costume with sunglasses, reaching out with both hands.

Joy Lab was the only logical next move.

In February 2025, I found myself in a city with no community clay studio and a growing list of people asking the same question: Where do I go to learn ceramics in Thousand Oaks?

So I started one.

A small space. A big dream. A handful of people who showed up with open hearts and mud-ready hands. A friend who said "if you start this, I'm a yes" — and that was enough.

Joy Lab Ceramics is now at 1625 E Thousand Oaks Blvd — a real home for clay, community, and the quietly radical act of making something with your hands.

This is more than a studio. It's a movement. A rebellion of joy.

A woman standing in a pottery studio, smiling, wearing a yellow sweatshirt, light purple pants, and yellow shoes. The studio has wooden shelves with pottery and supplies, a wooden table with pottery pieces on it, and colorful plastic stools.

Get your hands into something good.

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