Jessica Accamando seems to be everywhere in her community. With her signature blue hair, glasses and almost perpetual smile, she is one of the hardest-working people around. If something meaningful is happening in Hermosa Beach, chances are Jessica had a hand in it. Beside her is her wife, Ashley Tull—wickedly funny, fiercely loyal and the kind of person you instinctively know has your back.
Together they have created something incredibly special on Cypress Avenue in Hermosa Beach: The Studio and Not Shockboxx, neighboring creative spaces built around art, music and, more than anything, community. But to understand what they have built, you have to understand them.
Jessica has been gathering people her entire life. Born in a tiny Illinois town to a Mexican mother and American father, she moved to Las Vegas at age 8. By high school she was student body president, involved in many activities and convinced she might one day become a senator.
“I’ve always found people,” she says. “I’ve always been in a club or a community or something. That’s how I thrive.”
After studying political communications at The George Washington University, she eventually landed in the South Bay. But somewhere along the way, Jessica realized she had been living a life she thought she was supposed to want.
Near the end of her first marriage, she attended a design conference alone and posted online asking whether anyone else attending solo wanted to meet. One hundred people showed up.
“I came back from that trip and realized this is what I’ve been missing,” she says, and community became a recurring theme in her life.
Ashley arrived at that same understanding through a vastly different road. Growing up in a small Indiana town, she knew at a young age that she was different. Home was not a place where she felt accepted or safe. At 17, she packed what she could into her car and left, eventually finding her way to Las Vegas.
Then at age 30, everything changed. After suffering severe headaches and nosebleeds, Ashley was diagnosed with advanced melanoma on her scalp and told she might not live to see 31. What followed was a terrifying journey through doctors and surgeries until a UCLA medical team offered her a chance.
“I’m not gonna die at 30,” she remembers thinking.
She eventually found her way to Hermosa Beach and to Jessica. She started over again, first at El Camino College and ultimately at UCLA, finding both an education and another kind of community.
Perhaps when you’ve fought that hard for your own life, you understand how precious it is to make another person feel seen. Which brings us to Kevin Sousa.
Kevin was an extraordinarily talented musician, therapist and beloved South Bay fixture. His music, friendship and generosity touched countless lives throughout the community.
Jessica and Ashley became part of Kevin’s orbit during COVID-19, when a small group of locals came together to keep people connected. Jessica helped build a volunteer network that grew to roughly 350 people, while she, Ashley, Kevin, Russ Gilbert and others created an online music event called Spring Fest.
While talking with Kevin’s wife, Patti, Ashley discovered that Kevin was also battling melanoma and being treated by the same UCLA doctor connected to Ashley’s cancer journey. Kevin and Patti became like family to Jessica and Ashley.
“I knew I wanted to be involved with this family because it was really the first time that I had ever experienced family,” Ashley says.
Kevin would wrap his arms around her and tell her everything would be OK. “I had never had that before,” she shares.
When Kevin passed away, the loss reverberated through the South Bay. Eventually, the future of Hermosa Music Company—the rehearsal and creative space Kevin had built on Cypress Avenue—became uncertain. But Jessica and Ashley couldn’t bear to see it disappear.
“We knew we were saving a space for the music community,” Jessica says. “We’re preserving this thing that all of Kevin’s circle of friends needed.”
In August 2024, they took it on and renamed it simply The Studio. There was no grand business plan, simply a desire to keep the doors open and allow the space to become whatever the community needed it to be.
Today, The Studio is a true creative place: part rehearsal room, part gathering place, part workshop, and in many ways an extension of Jessica and Ashley’s home. Musicians come to rehearse and write songs. The community gathers for intimate concerts, sound baths, record-release parties, recitals, fix-it clinics, clothing swaps and arts-and-crafts nights.
“I like small events,” Jessica says. “I like community building.”
There is history in the rooms surrounding it too. The adjoining art space belonged to Mike Collins, one of Kevin’s closest friends and, like Kevin, an artist and therapist. His personal studio occupied the back room, which Jessica and Ashley initially borrowed for events at The Studio.
After Kevin died, Mike found it difficult to return to his art. “I haven’t painted in a year since Kev died,” Jessica recalls him saying.
When he decided to step away in 2025, he encouraged Jessica and Ashley to keep the gallery going themselves. In what seems to be the recurring theme of their lives, they said yes.
That gallery became Not Shockboxx, an intimate contemporary art space where artists from the South Bay and across the country can show their work outside the confines of a traditional gallery model.
The adjoining Back Box Artist Society has become another creative community of its own—a wonderfully organic, cross-generational group of women who come together to make art, turn on music, share ideas and simply be together. Some are professional artists; others have day jobs. What connects them is the desire to create, and Jessica and Ashley have created a place to belong.
Neither The Studio nor Not Shockboxx are driven primarily by profit. Jessica and Ashley continue investing their own money to keep them alive. Both now operate under the Hermosa and Free Foundation, named for Kevin’s final album.
As visible community leaders, Jessica and Ashley have unfortunately endured harassment, hate, accusations, and a tremendous emotional and financial toll. Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about these two women is what they have chosen to do with that ugliness.
They experienced division but created connection. They experienced hate but created beauty. They experienced moments when they did not feel safe but built a place where other people could.
“Safety was the biggest thing that I didn’t have as a child,” Ashley says. “And it’s the biggest thing that I would like to continue to give people.”
There are photographs of Kevin throughout The Studio and Not Shockboxx. Jessica and Ashley carry his stickers when they travel. His presence is everywhere.
“We want to live like Kevin did,” Jessica says, “making people feel loved and treasured and safe.”
Maybe that is how a legacy really lives—not simply in the places we preserve but in the way we make people feel once they’re inside them. And on Cypress Avenue, through music and art and hugs and conversations and the two women who keep showing up, Kevin’s light is still shining. And so is theirs.
