about the artist

René Henley

To call oneself an artist is an act of faith. It is a title earned through discipline, seriousness, and respect for those who came before. Born in Panama City and raised between cultures, I grew up in a lineage of painters, musicians, and writers. Creativity was familiar — but claiming it as vocation required proof.

Fashion Designer

Founder & Director

Born of the Journey

At twenty, I moved to Miami pursuing a modeling contract — my first deliberate step toward a life built around expression. It was not about fashion alone, but about proximity to image, performance, and presence. That instinct to move toward creative gravity has never left me.

My path unfolded with intention. I trained in film at the New York Film Academy, developing a language of atmosphere and narrative.

In 2009, I founded AstaYoga in San Francisco, my first business venture — a yoga studio and teacher training school. For over a decade, I served as Founder, Owner, and Director, overseeing operations, developing curriculum, selecting faculty, and personally training and certifying more than 300 teachers. Leadership and authorship became part of my creative discipline.

While directing the studio, I returned to formal academia and earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Fashion Design from the Academy of Art University. Structure refined instinct. Education formalized what had already been building.

Music has always run parallel to these chapters. Since 2006, I have written and produced original songs — professionally recorded works that remain the most immediate expression of my interior world. Through melody, rhythm, and voice, I articulate what image and object cannot fully contain.

House of Henley is the synthesis of these movements. It is a Fine Arts & Fashion Design Studio operating under my name — where narrative, fashion, interiors, photography, and object design converge.

My work lives at the threshold between realism and the surreal — between architecture and emotion, cinema and structure. I am less interested in products than in atmospheres. Each creation carries fragments of lived experience — roads taken deliberately, identities refined, worlds observed and reconstructed.

Nothing in this path has been accidental.
Each step has progressed toward authorship.

House of Henley is not a beginning.
It is consolidation.

And I continue —
under my own name,
with clarity and conviction.