It all started in a small village
in Ivory Coast.
Maryline Anna Roux is an artist, author, athlete, and yoga teacher. She was born in West Africa on the Ivory Coast in the village Vieux-Badien. Born to an African mother and French father, she left her birth country when she was one year old and spent the first 25 years of her life near Paris with her adoptive family, which she revisits in her upcoming memoir, Shadows of The Ivory. She moved to the United States in 1993 after meeting and marrying her American husband, Patrick.
Life took her to California, where she gave birth to her first son, Cheyn. Three years later, she studied Interior Design at Berkeley University while pregnant with her second child, Tevenn. One of the classes in her curriculum was perspective drawing. There, she realized her sense of proportion and perception, and an artist was born. Her first love is female nude figure drawing. She loves to play with the curves; by exploring the various facets of femininity, she creates the flavors of her own sensuality. Later on, she explored and began to draw portraits. A first drawing of her three sons, offered as a Christmas gift, started a series of portraits, including her own.
Maryline has been a yoga student for two decades. She became a yoga teacher in 2005 and taught Hatha yoga for 15 years. In 2018, she discovered the Kaiut yoga practice. She connected right away with Francico Kaiut’s method and embarked on his teacher trainings, first in Telluride, Colorado, and soon after in Amsterdam, Netherlands. In 2019, she began to teach Kaiut yoga in Colorado. Since COVID-19, she opened her own virtual yoga studio — La Vie Yoga — where she teaches group and private classes. Maryline continues her never-ending yogi education taking various virtual teacher courses with Francisco Kaiut.
Maryline believes in chasing dreams regardless of their level of difficulty. She pursues whatever attracts her interest. At 45 years old, she tried to represent the Track & Field Ivory Coast Team for the London Olympics to honor her African Mother. In 2015, she moved to Barcelona for two years, after her youngest son, Donovan, only 11 years old at the time, had been selected to play soccer with a local team. In January 2019, she moved to Colorado with Donovan after he was recruited by the Colorado Rapids Soccer Club, where she continued to create through her artwork and poetry.
By summer 2020, she came back to her love of writing, determined to finish her memoir. With the profits from the book, Maryline plans to create a foundation in honor of her African mother, and help build her African village, Vieux-Badien, so it may rise up from poverty.
History of the Photo
In this photo, Maryline’s French father, Yvon Soulard, is on a small boat trying to capture
a picture her African Mother, Therese Yei Meledge, who is hiding behind a tree.
