Who I am
I am a queer, non-binary, artist and therapist, in service to somatic and collective liberation. I also show up in the community as a Registered Social Worker, mental health educator, movement/yoga teacher, dancer/performer, and cat lover. I am a second generation white settler of Italian and Danish descent. I live, work and play in Tkaronto. I come from a big family of three sisters, who mean the world to me. I was raised in a working class family. I am able-bodied, neurospicey and hold a lived experience of navigating the mental health system in Ontario. I am a community oriented person and understand the importance of chosen family. I am a proud Zia of two wonderful niblings, and in a long term loving open/CNM partnership.
What else I bring with me
As a somatic careworker, I take a liberatory and justice-oriented approach that honors each person's embodied wisdom and strengths. In my private practice I offers holistic support for experiential and relational healing, weaving somatic practices, expressive arts, movement, and sound meditation - all grounded through a lens of cultural humility. I also work part-time as a gender affirming counsellor at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, supporting trans and gender diverse youth, and their families navigating gender questioning and transition. I love supporting people in reconnecting with their bodies, to find a sense of presence, steadiness, and creative expression as pathways toward resilience and a more livable future.
Aside from my work as a therapist, I bring two decades of experience as a performance artist with me. As an artist, I explore improvisational dance, physical theatre, drag, burlesque, and clowning to explore themes of satire, madness, and sensuality. As a draglesque performer, I enjoy playing with fiercely character-driven acts, fearless physicality and presence. It feels exciting as a performer to explore ways to blur the lines between the absurd and the erotic, the ridiculous and the regal. I am curious about ways to embody the archetypes of the fool, or the trickster, as portals to the sacred and the profane. My perform work is deeply inspired by the New Romantics movement and Commedia dell’Arte.
I have had the privilege to travel abroad for my performance and dance practice, which has taken me to Bahrain, Banff, Berlin, Montreal, New York City, Sao Paulo, Stratford, and Vienna. I have collaborated and worked with various artists and companies including Alyssa Martin (Rock Bottom, Toronto), Amanda Acorn (Toronto), Austin Fagan (Berlin), Alvin Collantes (Berlin), Dock11**** (Toronto), FAWN Chamber Creative (Toronto), Ismael Ivo (Vienna + Sao Paulo), Kuo-Han Chen Sànchez (Berlin), Lake Studio (Berlin), and Toronto Love-In, among others.
I bring over two decades of experience as an artist and movement educator working with embodiment to my practice as a therapist. My ongoing training in Sensorimotor Psychotherapy and Parts Work deepens my ability to integrate this embodied knowledge into my clinical practice.
Check out my Psychology Today profile here!
Check out some my creative work here!
How I found my way to this work...
I've always been deeply curious about ways of expression that move beyond words — about the layers of meaning that can emerge through the body, sensation, and movement. My journey into this work has been shaped by a lifelong interest in human stories, especially the ones we carry in our soma. I come from a lineage of artists and healers, and grew up surrounded by creative expression as a way of understanding and connecting.
My path began as dancer and visual artist since I was very young, where storytelling through art and the body became a way to make sense of my inner world. For me, physical and artistic expression through art was an integral part of my life. I moved to Toronto in 2009 to study and pursue a career in the performing arts. I received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Dance from Toronto Metropolitan University in 2013 and have continued to follow this passion, working with various dance theatre companies and independent artists both locally and abroad in Europe.
Throughout those years, I found myself returning to my yoga mat—at first with the intention of strengthening my body, but later realizing that what I truly needed was slower, more attuned movement. This curiosity led me to explore a range of somatic movement practices such as the Alexander Technique, the Feldenkrais Method, Laban, Axis Syllabus, Authentic Movement, and Rolfing. This exploration became a turning point for me.
In 2018, I immersed myself in learning about the mind–body connection and discovered Body-Mind Centering® (BMC), which I studied for several years in Montreal with Mariko Tanabe and others. While engaging in BMC Somatic Movement Practitioner studies, I was also working toward a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology, driven by a growing interest in becoming a therapist. I didn’t yet know how I would merge my love for somatics with my passion for understanding the mind and human experience—but I was excited by the possibilities that integration could offer.
In 2019, I began offering free somatic movement sessions to artists, dancers, and friends in my community as a way to build experience supporting others with their own embodiment goals. I later went on to complete a Master of Social Work (MSW) at the University of Toronto, which allowed me to become a Registered Social Worker and practice psychotherapy and counselling.
Ultimately, my greatest motivation for becoming a therapist came from my own healing journey, particularly the years I spent throughout my 20s working with a somatic therapist, who had a body-oriented approach. I realized that therapy (especially somatic therapy) offered a dynamic and non-linear way of working with trauma. It welcomed creativity, aliveness, and the body’s intelligence into the process of healing. Those sessions profoundly changed my life. That experience is precisely why I now do this work: to support others in the same compassionate, embodied way I was once supported.
Values
I am committed to creating a culturally sensitive space that welcomes individuals of all identities, cultural backgrounds, faith traditions, neurotypes, and gender expressions. I strive to cultivate an environment that is gender-affirming, neurodiversity-affirming, and grounded in respect for each person’s unique lived experience. I hold a sex positive space for those exploring poly/consensual non-monogamy or other non-heteronormative relationship dynamics, and those who engage in sex work. I strive to hold a brave space and I stay open to feedback around the best way to support the needs and dignity of each person I engage with. In my practice, I will not tolerate transphobia, homophobia, Islamophobia, Anti-semitism, fat phobia, racism, sexism, classism, ableism, or any other "-isms", discrimination or stigmatization.
Most somatic modalities as we known them in the west were started by cis-gender white people (like Peter Levine, Bonnie Bainbridge, Pat Ogden, and many others) and have taken from other Indigenous, Eastern and African healing practices. Somatics has been around for as long as humans have, across various cultures and communities. Many of these white somatic 'pioneers' who brought somatics to the western world failed to included intergenerational trauma and contextual social/political//economic trauma in their approaches. As a politicized somatics worker, I continually include these contextual factors into my practice to hold myself and others within these larger histories and communities.
I am a Registered Social Worker (MSW, RSW) in good standing with the Ontario College of Social Workers and Social Service Workers (OCSWSSW). I hold this designation with critical awareness. I recognize the history—and ongoing reality—of harm that the social work profession has enacted, particularly toward Black, Indigenous, and other marginalized communities. My membership with the College is complex and often conflicted. My abolitionist stance includes a commitment to imagining and working toward forms of care and accountability beyond the structures of social work as it is currently practiced.
Lineage, Un-learning, Re-learning, Re-membering
A part of this learning means acknowledge the lineage of where my practices come from, who my teachers are and what their influences were. Acknowledgment of lineage is an on-going process of uncovering the layers of history that has shaped the practices I am in relationship with, as a means towards reciprocity and repair. Without this acknowledgment, western somatic healing modalities, yoga and birthwork paradigms will remain embedded within the values of white supremacy. A fellow practitioner recently drew my attention this article by Susan Raffo which has been a helpful tool for me in addressing appropriation in somatics and related fields.
The first step towards lineage acknowledgment is naming my practices, from who these practices emerged from. I don't adhere to any one discipline or modality. I practice in an interdisciplinary way that includes my training in euro-western modalities. As a student of yoga asana and meditation, I have studied in the foundational practice of ashtanga vinyasa of K. Pattabhi Jois, shared with me through a western lens as a student of Downward Dog Yoga Centre, where I completed by YTT in 2013 with Ron Reid and many other teachers within the school and beyond as I continued my yoga education over the years. My primary somatic movement education and somatic psychotherapy training comes from Body-Mind Centering (Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen and Mariko Tanabe) and Sensorimotor Psychotherapy (Pat Ogden), respectively. Generative Somatics also deeply informs my own practice and the way I show up as a careworker/therapist. All of these modalities have taken from Indigenous healing and contemplative practices originating in Eastern and African cultures.
As a co-conspirator, I have learned from and been shaped by the grassroots and artistic work of angel Kyodo williams, Che Che Luna, Jacks McNamara, Kai Cheng Thom, Lara Sheehi, Layla Saad, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Lindsay Elin, Marika Heinrichs, Raina El Mugammar, Ravyn Wngz, Renee Linklater, Resmaa Menakem, Rodney Diverlus, Sage Hayes, and Syrus Marcus Ware, just to name a few. I am grateful to these teachers, mentors, community members and to the many movement teachers I have had over the last 20+ years who have shared their wisdom and teachings with me.
land and practice acknowledgements
PRACTICES:
Many of the practices and techniques I draw upon include elements of yoga and somatic practices that originate from Eastern and African mind-body lineages. Many of these practices in the west blur the origins and traditions of these mindful practices. By acknowledging their origins I strive to honour these practices with care and reverence. I continually work to question and leave room for the ways I can better show up in these practices as guest, to honour them and their teachers. I am forever humbled and grateful as student to these practices.
LAND:
I am a second generation Italian-Danish settler living on the stolen and unceded territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, the Anishnaabek Peoples, the Wendat and the Chippewa First Nations. Tkaronto is governed by many treaties including The Two Row Wampum, The Williams Treaty, The Toronto Purchase Treaty/Treaty 13, and The Dish With One Spoon. Tkaronto is home to many different First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples. I acknowledge the ongoing violence and cultural genocide the First Nations peoples experience under the colonial project known as "Canada". I pay my respects to their elders, past, present and emerging, and stand behind them in their fight for justice and self-determination, we cannot be free until everyone is free. I acknowledge how the struggles and resistance of colonial violence of the Native population here on Turtle Island is connected to the same struggles and resistance of Indigenous peoples around the world who are currently experiencing on-going ethnic cleansing and genocide at the hands of settler colonial violence.
I continue to explore the ways in which my work can support movements for decolonization and liberation on this land. I am learning what it means to honour these ancestries, and my own ancestry in right way. With this acknowledgment comes a responsibility to educate ourselves to our real history. To critically challenge the conditions and attitudes that we have been mis-educated and socialized to accept as givens and to stand shoulder to shoulder in solidarity with Indigenous people in their just demands for Land Back in order to pursue and win climate justice and our collective liberation through a just transition.