I have worked in dance, movement and somatic practice for over 30 years believing passionately in the creative health benefits that movement brings to individuals and their communities.
As a registered Somatic Movement Educator & Therapist with the International Somatic Movement Education and Therapy Association (ISMETA), I offer professional supervision, mentorship and consultancy to independent practitioners and organsiations.
My professional background in contemporary dance, improvisation, performance and teaching has its foundations in dance-in-education. I had 5 incredible years working at Ludus, with children who awoke and instilled in me the significant impact that participatory dance and the expressive arts can have on our physical and imaginative life.
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These early years of my dance career helped me find my body, to play, and to strengthen, shape and craft my movement. In my late twenties, a personal crisis led me to pay more attention to my interior world and I began a process of healing and change which transformed my work.
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I followed a call to the inner life of the body, beckoned throughout years of somatic movement education, bodywork and therapy. In 2002, I began to study the Discipline of Authentic Movement and Body-Mind Centering with Linda Hartley and have a Diploma from her Institute for Integrative Bodywork and Movement Therapy (IBMT). I am an External Examiner there, and continue to study with Linda and my peers.
As a senior lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire (1998-2021), I was course director of MA Dance & Somatic Wellbeing: Connections to the Living Body. Embodiment, movement and arts practice within a wellbeing context, made this a particularly unique and rare course, which was carefully delivered through studio practices of sensing, feeling, moving, and witnessing, and illuminated through theoretical and philosophical inquiry. I am a National Teaching Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA), and gained my master’s by research, in 2005, at Manchester Metropolitan University.
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For over 12 years I have run a private therapeutic practice working with clients. My approach to therapy involves talking but centres around what is felt in the body, helping clients find a sense of safety in their body as they learn how to regulate physical sensations and emotions more effectively and creatively.
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Most recently I have co-created a Community Interest Company called Shoreline Health in Motion, CIC. Together with other dance in health professionals based in Lancashire and Cumbria, our company will offer workshops, 1-2-1 client sessions, as well as events and research opportunities.
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