Meet Jeff and Lisa Manning:

a midwestern couple living the(ir) dream

interview: katie michels photography: jamie klimes

A combination yoga studio and art center is not something you see everyday. But for owners Jeff and Lisa Manning, this joint business allows them to support their family while exploring and sharing their passions with others. Nido Art Studio and the Aurora Yoga Center are located in a quaint one-story brick building just off a main road in the second largest city in Illinois. Staff photographer, Jamie Klimes, and I had the pleasure of meeting up with the couple in their studio and peeking in during some current classes.

The couple met in 1993 while skiing in BreuilCervinia, Italy – home to the Matterhorn Mountain, which straddles the border between Italy and Switzerland. Lisa was studying abroad in Rome for a year, and Jeff was on his second year of a four-year tour of duty with the United States Army, Airborne. Once the couple married in 1998, they moved to Lisa’s hometown of Aurora, IL. Subsequent moves to Jeff’s home state of Idaho and Sonoma, California followed. Now, nineteen years after first meeting, Lisa and Jeff are once again residing in Aurora, working on their respective careers and raising their three young children.

As someone who has always been passionate about art, Lisa’s path to her current home away from home – Nido – has been one filled with years of studying and practicing numerous art forms. After finding inspiration and guidance from a local art director, Lisa went on to earn her bachelors degree from Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame, in Indiana in 1996. While there she immersed herself in classes on everything from paper and printmaking to fibers, new media, and design. After graduation, Lisa moved to Chicago and took more classes in sewing and textile arts while waiting tables and working part time at a children’s summer camp.

After marrying Jeff in May of 1998, Lisa worked at a screen-printing shop in a neighboring town while painting murals in people’s homes. After a year, the couple moved to Moscow, Idaho. There Jeff completed his degree in therapeutic recreation at the University of Idaho and Lisa earned her Masters in Fine Arts. While in Idaho the couple also welcomed their first daughter, Olivia. For her thesis Lisa focused on fiber arts and worked almost exclusively in embroidery. “I built 388 frames in the wood shop while I was pregnant. My thesis ended up being focused on women’s work, cycles, nature, and the moon.”

Coincidentally, around the same time it was Lisa who introduced Jeff to yoga when she took him to his very first class in 1999. As Jeff said, “I knew twenty minutes into the yoga class that I needed to teach this, because it was a modality that anybody could do: kids, seniors, physical rehab. [Yoga] was a toolbox for everything.” During his studies at the University of Illinois, Jeff had yet to find a modality that encompassed people at all stages of life and physical ability – until he discovered yoga. That immediate love for yoga led him to become a teacher, because most of all he wanted to help people before they would need a hospital or the therapeutic recreation degree he was earning. A frustration with the health care system and new-found appreciation for an ancient tradition motivated Jeff to quit his job and pursue his new passion.

But before Jeff was to become a self-employed yoga instructor, he and Lisa moved to Sonoma, California in 2002 where Jeff had gotten a job doing therapeutic recreation. While there Lisa and Jeff continued to learn and teach their respective passions. Jeff learned yoga from The Iyengar Institute of San Francisco and Lisa worked with local schools and art groups. The couple also welcomed their second daughter, Iris, in 2004.

In 2006, a third child – Leo – was added to the brood. That same year Lisa and Jeff found themselves back where they had started, living in Aurora, though with many life lessons and experiences under their belts. Not to mention they were now a family of five! Immediately after settling back in the Midwest, Jeff began teaching as many yoga classes as possible – at the local university, athletic centers, and even the family’s basement. Lisa worked from home on her new clothing business called Nido Threads, which means “nest” in both Spanish and Italian. As Lisa explained, she chose the name because “it was what I was doing – working from my [own] nest with little scraps of fabric.”

As time went on the Manning’s house was no longer a plausible location for yoga classes. Jeff began renting one half of what would become the Aurora Yoga Center in 2009. A year later, in 2010, Lisa realized her desire to once again teach children about art, and she converted the other half of the building into Nido Art Studio.

Today they are happy to see how their class sizes and community have grown in the past few years. Many of the devoted students who started with Jeff in his home back in 2006 continue to attend weekly yoga classes at the AYC. If you ever have the opportunity to stop into this joint studio, you will find the same thesis project Lisa created nearly a decade ago hanging on the wall near the entrance. The Mannings truly are an inspiration to those of us aspiring to do the thing we love, whatever it may be.