Our Story

Built by Lived Experience.

Held by Play.

Play isn’t something you outgrow. It’s something you forget.
We built this studio to bring it back.

Wicked Rae’s wasn’t built from a business plan.

It was built on lived experience, encompassing art, athletics, psychology, survival, and care.

Every experience we design comes from people who have held others under pressure, navigated trauma without becoming defined by it, and believe deeply in play as a fundamental human need - not a luxury.

Your Wicked Crew

Oakley Rae

Co-Founder & Creative Director | Experience Designer

Oakley leads the way she creates: with instinct, precision, and care for the people around her.

From a young age, she understood that movement isn’t just physical - it’s emotional.

Sports were her first language. Under the guidance of Coach Simmons, her basketball coach, she learned what it means to be seen under pressure. Not just to perform - but to be trusted.

As a team manager for three years, Oakley did more than track stats. She trained athletes. Sat in on one-on-ones. Helped teammates find their footing when confidence wavered or emotions overflowed. She learned how rhythm builds trust, how teams synchronize, and how people rise when they feel genuinely supported.

She learned early that leadership isn’t loud.

It’s attentive.

Growing Through What Life Hands You

Oakley grew up alongside her mother through experiences that required resilience beyond her years. Together, they navigated domestic violence, rebuilding, and the long work of creating safety again.

What Oakley took from that time wasn’t fear - it was clarity.

She learned how environments shape people.

How chaos can either shut someone down - or set them free.

How joy, when it’s real, is an act of strength.

She understands what it costs to start over. And what it means to build something better.

Making Space for Others

Creativity was never theoretical for Oakley - it was hands-on, immersive, and relational.

She graduated high school at 15 and stepped fully into her role as a working artist, designer, and facilitator. Every workshop. Every demo. Every piñata - handmade. Every party - coordinated down to the last detail.

The original artwork on the tote bags? She draws it.

In the studio, Oakley is with the kids - on the floor, in the paint, moving alongside them. Some have asked her not to forget them.

She won’t.

She designs sensory-based workshops for children ages 3–6 that get bodies moving while creating texture-rich art. Mess is not only allowed - it’s encouraged.

These experiences build neuroplasticity, resilience, creative confidence, and body awareness. Kids learn early that expression is safe.

Oakley doesn’t just facilitate experiences.

She holds space - with warmth, clarity, and instinctive attunement.

Designing the Experience Itself

Now studying sports medicine, art, baking, and forensic psychology, Oakley designs every custom experience at Wicked Rae’s - from corporate activations and team workshops to private celebrations and field installations across Washington.

She understands how bodies move.
How energy shifts in groups.
How trust forms through play.

If you’ve thrown paint with us - Oakley helped build that moment.

She was also the one who told her mom to go back to art.

Then she built the company alongside her.

Who She Is Beyond the Studio

When not covered in paint: walking Bones Fish while learning violin, dominating friends in long-distance gaming, crocheting while diving into forensic psychology books, designing clothes, watching horror movies, or inventing recipes that shouldn’t work - but somehow do.

Favorite animals: vampire squid and squirrels.

Life goal: see the world.

Jules McVey

Co-Founder & CEO | Athletic Expressionism™ Pioneer

Jules learned early how to feel deeply - and how rare that is in a world that rewards numbing.

At 16, she walked away from scholarships to bet on herself. As an emancipated minor in Tucson, she worked full-time while attending community college, bagging groceries at an organic market by day and searching for meaning by night.

It was there she discovered acting - not as performance, but as connection.

She wrote a one-woman show. Performed it. Moved an entire classroom to tears.

Her professor gave her one note:
Stay with this. You move people to feel.

So she did.

She left college and moved to Los Angeles, working in real estate to survive while building a creative life in entertainment. She illustrated for the History Channel and Discovery Channel. She did voiceover work. She acted on Roswell, Freaks & Geeks, Felicity, and the original 90210. She fell in love with the invisible art of background work - how energy moves through a space, how emotion transfers without words.

She was learning how humans attune to one another.

The Moment Everything Changed

Then, at 18, Jules died.

Her car flipped ten times off the I-10 in West Covina. Bystanders said a stranger pulled her from the wreckage - and then disappeared. Paramedics brought her back. A firefighter stayed with her in the ER until her family arrived.

That moment rewired her understanding of humanity.

She left Hollywood that week.

What stayed with her wasn’t fear- it was presence. The power of someone staying. The way calm travels from one nervous system to another. The way safety can exist even in chaos.

She decided to become that person for others.

Learning How Humans Survive

After healing from a fractured spine, Jules went back to school and into service. She studied aerospace engineering. Graduated from the fire academy in Sacramento in 2004. Spent summers as a wildland and structural firefighter.

Fire taught her what pressure really does to people.

Who freezes.
Who leads.
Who listens.
Who holds.

Later, epilepsy monitoring led her into neurology and sleep medicine. She fell in love with the brain - with how the body processes stress, fear, rest, and recovery.

For over 20 years, Jules worked across hospitals, universities, private labs, and the VA system. She served as a clinical director and sleep manager. She helped veterans rest. She mapped brains. She built systems of care for people who had been running on empty for far too long.

At the same time, life kept happening.

Domestic violence. Leaving. Homelessness. Rebuilding while raising her daughter.

And still - she finished her Bachelor’s degree in 2015. Her Master’s in Psychology in 2017. Reached ABD in Industrial-Organizational Psychology by 2020.

Her work became about one question:

How do humans function under pressure - and how do they recover?

From Holding Space to Creating It

During COVID, Jules paused her PhD to take on safety roles. In 2022, she was recruited by Meta into Learning & Development. In 2023, tech layoffs closed that chapter.

It was her daughter, Oakley, who said:
Go back to your first love.

Art.
Sports.
Psychology.
Neurology.
Together.

That permission changed everything.

Wicked Rae’s was born from the realization that people don’t need more words. They need movement. They need play. They need places where emotion is allowed to move through the body instead of getting stuck inside it.

Why Wicked Rae’s Exists

Jules has lived many lives: artist, performer, firefighter, clinician, psychologist, survivor. Every one of them shows up in the splatter room.

She spent 20 years helping people sleep.
Now she wakes them up.

Her work today sits at the intersection of performance psychology, nervous system regulation, creative expression, and lived survival. Athletic Expressionism™ exists because she has spent decades watching what happens when people are pushed - and learning what it takes to bring them back into themselves.

This studio is not an escape.
It’s a return.

Board Member, Friends of Lake Sammamish State Park.

When not covered in paint: escaping to the mountains (the further from WiFi, the better), volunteering, traveling, mastering old-school board games, and creating art.

Bones-Fish

Chief Morale Officer & Nervous System Regulator

Every studio needs a soul. Ours has four legs, came from Vermont, and answers to an excellent name.

Bones is a 10-year-old English Foxhound - distinguished, gentle, and smarter than he lets on. He reads a room before anyone speaks.

Nervous kid walks in with tight shoulders? Bones finds them. They play. The shoulders drop. It happens every time.

One student came to Wicked Rae's weekly while going through chemo. For eight months, Bones laid his head in her lap during every painting class. She told us he was one of the reasons she beat her cancer. We believe her.

He doesn't need to be asked. He just knows who needs him.

In his decade of life, Bones has traveled all over the United States.

He loves road trips, hiking, beaches - anywhere outside, really.

His favorite foods are pistachios, bell peppers, bacon, cheese, carrots, and meat of any kind.

Above all, he loves his family. And he loves being here for you.