We built a life together first. The magazine came after.

Co-founder and Editor

Jesse James Ferrell

Jesse James Ferrell is a speaker, writer, recording artist and bodyworker. He co-founded Untamed Today with Mike Calva, conducts every interview himself and shapes the editorial voice of the magazine. His stages include TEDx, DEBx and Global Possibility, and his interviews and features have appeared in Vanity Fair UAE, GQ Spain, Vogue Monaco, Forbes Vancouver and Legendary Arabia.

His practice is more than twenty-five years old. Untamed Today is where it now lives in public, at full identity, without the edit. Every cover feature on this site began as a long conversation in the interview room, one question at a time, and the subject signs off on every word before it goes live.

He has wanted to make music his whole life. He was a boy who sat for hours inside songs and a teenager who knew he was a singer, and he became a bodyworker, speaker, entrepreneur and coach before the music arrived. His recordings release through Soul Frequency Records, the independent label he founded, across pop, soul, reggae, tribal, house, meditation and spoken word. Each track tells a story he has shared from a stage or lived himself. He calls it the message he wished someone had played for him at twenty-two. The songs are for people who have loved and lost, for a boy who learned to hide before he learned to sing, and for anyone carrying more than they have told others.

In the body, he listens through touch. Each session is a conversation with the tissues: the compensation patterns, the pain, and the stories held in the fascia. He serves clients in Scottsdale and Mérida.

Jesse is the son of Barbara and Russell Ferrell, brother to five sisters and two brothers, the father of Andrew and Makayla, and the grandfather of Gabrielle and Noah. Those relationships are the emotional architecture of his voice.

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Co-founder and Design Director

Mike Calva

Mike Calva is the eye of Untamed Today. He creates every cover and every editorial image from the material each subject provides, so every face on this site is original, made with that person, and signed off by them before it is seen. Nothing is stock. Nothing is borrowed.

The look of the magazine is his: the covers, the nine doors, the way black and cream sit together, the gold that catches the light. Where Jesse brings the questions, Mike brings the frame.

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Jesse and Mike

Together

Two editors, one vision

Jesse and Mike are married, and they are creative partners, travelers and builders. Their rhythm spans Mexico City, Mérida in the Yucatán, and Phoenix, where Jesse keeps his practice. They built a life together first. The magazine came after, as a place to tell the stories they kept meeting along the way, in full, and to let the people in them stay untamed.