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Hi! My name is Lila. I’m an Intimacy Specialist. 

I’m also a Public Speaker, Writer, Actress, & Curator of Immersive events.

As the daughter of an American psychologist & a Brazilian social worker, I’ve been a student of human relationships for about as long as I’ve been a human.

I’ve had pillow talk with thousands of people (most of whom were not my lovers!), and 127 of those conversations are broadcast for the world to hear on my indie podcast horizontal with lila. 

horizontal is consensual eavesdropping on private conversations. It’s a show about sex, love, and relationships of all kinds … recorded entirely while lying down. I made private conversations public in order to dispel shame, ease loneliness, and alchemizing human connection. I know most people don’t have access to the kind of raw, revealing, vulnerable conversations I get to have every day, multiple times a day. I wanted to give you access. And so I have.

In the words of listener ghost_heart, horizontal “takes you into her bed and lets your ears watch as she unzips intimate conversations.” Women’s Health includes horizontal in:

The 25 Best Sex Podcasts About Relationships, Erotica, Kinks, And More (Hear that? That’s the sound of pleasure.)

And Marie Claire dubs the show “an intimate, thoughtful, often funny sex podcast” and calls it “sexy, poetic, and eye-opening,” naming it among:

The 35 Best Sex Podcasts of All Time

Which is an honor! That points to a problem.

We use the word intimacy as synonymous with sex. But intimacy is not sex. And sex is not always intimate – as many of us know.

I believe intimacy is the cure for the pandemic of loneliness…

 

but only if we can expand our definition of what intimacy is, and can be. 

 {Look out for my INTIMACY card game in Winter 2022!}

I’ve presented my intimacy frameworks as a TED Idea Search Latin America 2021 finalist, a Business of Fashion VOICES conference speaker, and a SXSW 2022 presenter. Putting my NYU Tisch Drama (Experimental Theatre Wing) BFA to use!

Positively Sex! my new podcast for iHeart Media (the #1 Podcast Network in All the Land!) began as a live interactive audio show & winner of Clubhouse’s Creator First Program.

horizontal x iHeart = Positively Sex! Sex Ed, with Pleasure

Positively Sex! is available NOW DARLING, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, & all the other podcast places!

It will mostly be recorded while upright.

I used to be a yoga teacher (the fashion designer Pola Thomson’s fave, in fact), a world-touring AcroYoga instructor, the creator of The Acrobat’s Workout (featured on ABC7, The Today Show, and mic.com), a Thai Bodywork practitioner, and a v. serious tango dancer.

I speak Portuguese, my mother’s native language, and I’ve lived in Brazil, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Amsterdam, & Bali, Indonesia.

My pronouns are she/her; I’m a bisexual 1 on the Kinsey scale, and I really really like dresses. Among my favorite things are community, lipstick, the podcast Ear Hustle, closets organized by color, tiny folding bicycles, & my Vespa.

I was a founding member of Hacienda Villa, Brooklyn’s premiere sex-positive intentional community & center for intimacy education, and I lived there happily for 5 years. (Want me to write a memoir about it? Let a gal know.) My article on life as a Villan, “You Call it a Sex House; I Call it Home” was published in BUST Magazine in 2015.

As an intimacy coach, my clients explore kink, pleasure, alternative relationships, emotional intelligence, communication techniques, & unbraiding their true desires from what they’re “supposed to” want! (Not all at once. And not necessarily all. But typically at least one of these things.)

As an actress, I originated the role of Piper Pilfer in Woodshed Collective’s New York Times-lauded immersive play Empire Travel Agency.

As a public speaker and creator of immersive events, I host happenings such as horizontal storytelling pajama parties, Femme Domme Kink Tasters, connection games, hot love talks & a sensual, intimate Valentine’s experience for everyone, regardless of relationship status, called 14 Rooms. Friends who met at one of these events are still dating, 5 years later!

Know this: I don’t shy away from sex. Obviously! VIVA LA SEX! POSITIVELY SEX! YES! YES! YES!

I just want to put sex where it belongs: alongside all the other forms of intimacy that make up a nourishing life.

Now that! That is positively sex.