I am an eco-somatic movement practitioner, socially engaged artist, activist and doctoral researcher with the Visual Cultures department at Goldsmiths College, University of London. My fascination with bodymind practices started while I was reading Far Eastern philosophies for my first degree with the University of Malta, between 2009 and 2011. During this time, I started experimenting with various meditation techniques and observing the affects these techniques had on my own psyche, led me to complete an M.Sc in Psychology with the University of Essex, in 2013. I then moved away from academic research and plunged myself into the mental health field in London; working in various third-sector mental health services, across different boroughs and diverse client groups, taking psychosocial approaches to the experience of crisis. Before migrating into the community arts field, I facilitated bodymind practices in a mental health crisis recovery service in Islington. It is my experience of working with mainstream understandings of mental distress, alongside intensely devoting myself to nurturing and growing my dance movement improvisation practice, that led me to take a body-centred and interdisciplinary approach to both my practice and research. I am also a core contributor for Counterfield Collective together with my peers from the Visual Cultures department at Goldsmiths College and a member of the Embodied Research Working Group. 

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In April 2024, I successfully defended my PhD thesis entitled “Embodied storytelling and the ecological entanglements of distress: practice research of somatic movement through polycrisis” (2019-2024). In my practice-based PhD I approach the moving body as an ecologically entangled and storytelling medium, informed by my applied experience working in mental health crisis recovery services and embodied research encountering somatic and dance movement improvisation practices. The activist scholarship of Mad Studies and Critical Mental Health orientate my praxis to question experiences of distress as the sole responsibility of the individual to consider how structural inequities and material environments may also generate experiences of distress in a time of polycrisis. I engage embodied practices, primarily using dance movement improvisation as method, to unearth ecologically entangled and collective embodied storytelling. In this way, the methodology I developed through my practice research enables me to politicise personalised experiences in dominant approaches to mental health.

 

​My project enters the field of practice research by identifying a form of new activist scholarship which considers the potential application of the multiple modalities that my practice offers - from mixed dance and creative movement lineage - to respond to current frameworks of power in dance and therapeutic settings within an expanded field of movement studies. The unique signature of this practice, marked by a resistance toward oppressive norms, has yet to be met within current dance and proximate fields such as applied dance, as well as health professional communities of practice, thus responding to a gap within the field of dance and therapy.​​