About me

For the past decade, my work has been guided by a simple question: What can spirituality mean in the context of dancing and listening to music?

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I approach this question through aesthetic and somatic practices—treating movement, rhythm, and sensory experience as ways of exploring how spiritual meaning is lived and felt in the body.

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My early research focused on Sufism within Islamic traditions. Through fieldwork in Turkey, Pakistan, and India, I studied the Sufi practice of zikr, examining how collective chanting, rhythm, and movement allow practitioners to experience and articulate spirituality. This work formed the basis of my M.A. research and part of my doctoral inquiry.

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I later turned toward contemporary dance and the emergence of “spiritual but not religious” identities in the modern West. Conducting research primarily in Spain, I explored how contemporary movement practices create spaces where participants engage questions of presence, connection, and inner experience outside formal religious frameworks.

Over time, this research began to move from observation into practice. I trained in contemporary and community dance facilitation and began creating participatory formats that combine movement, somatic awareness, and collective attention. These workshops and residencies invite participants to explore embodiment as a way of relating to themselves, others, and the environments they inhabit.

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My current work, developed while living in Taiwan, investigates resonances between these practices and philosophical ideas drawn from Daoism. In particular, I am interested in concepts such as liminality, in-between states, and wu wei—often translated as effortless action or non-forcing. These ideas offer new ways of thinking about how movement, awareness, and relational presence can unfold without control or predetermined outcome.

 

Across research, facilitation, and artistic practice, my work explores how movement and sound can open spaces where spiritual, perceptual, and relational experience are re-examined in contemporary life.

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What is spirituality? 

​I operationalize spirituality as an embodied awareness and presence that allows one to connect with both oneself and others (humans and non-humans). It is not a transcendental, but rather immanent, relational, and process-oriented​.

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