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I am an artist, educator and scholar in experimental dance-theater and somatic education. My work in these two fields overlaps; the skills and sensibilities that I use as a body-based artist and teacher are closely related to those I use as a body-therapist. The core of my therapeutic work is teaching people body awareness. I do this through skilled touch, passive and active movement and verbal coaching. At the core of my art practice is my fascination with interdependence. I aim to use my art work, my healing work and my writing in the service of social justice. I am based in Santa Rosa, CA. Contact information: nina.galin@gmail.com |
I call my efforts an institute to emphasize their collaborative nature, and their basis in a spirit of inquiry. I identify my work as somatic and aesthetic to signal the importance of sensory, embodied and non-linear kinds of knowledge. I align myself with critical thinking to show my ongoing concern with equitable distribution of social and political power.
Each of us enacts social justice work in different ways, depending on many factors. Our diverse relationships to state power, personal spiritual power, and to resources such as health, education and digital technologies all affect our approaches. On a given day, social justice work may be primarily inside one’s own body. On another it may take place in one’s family, workplace and community, across one’s country or around our planet. Each day I start this work on a very tiny, internal scale. I practice to develop strength to sustain the work on larger scales (interpersonal, community, national, global). Each client I touch, each class I teach, each performance I do, is a thread in this network of connections.
As a bodyworker I leave overt political discussion outside of the treatment room. For my own ethical reasons, I practice awareness of the social, political and economic context within which I offer bodywork.
I use body-based art-making, education and therapies to think about social and political issues such as structural racism, colonial violence, cultural appropriation, the effects of capitalism on health, and the decline of the nation-state.
My performance work incorporates movement, music and text. My background is in modern and postmodern dance and ballet, and contemporary and classical musics and texts. Improvisational skills (based on sensory-awareness) and non-violent communication form the core of my approach to both performance training and body therapy/learning .
My therapeutic-educational bodywork uses manual and massage therapies (myofascial release, structural integration, acupressure, passive stretching) in conjunction with body-awareness education, drawing on Alexander Technique, Feldenkrais Method, Pilates and yoga.
My research interests include: Individual and collective trauma; whiteness and critical race studies; relationships (metaphorical and literal) between body-politic and personal bodymind; self and other; political economies of bodyminds.
Each of us enacts social justice work in different ways, depending on many factors. Our diverse relationships to state power, personal spiritual power, and to resources such as health, education and digital technologies all affect our approaches. On a given day, social justice work may be primarily inside one’s own body. On another it may take place in one’s family, workplace and community, across one’s country or around our planet. Each day I start this work on a very tiny, internal scale. I practice to develop strength to sustain the work on larger scales (interpersonal, community, national, global). Each client I touch, each class I teach, each performance I do, is a thread in this network of connections.
As a bodyworker I leave overt political discussion outside of the treatment room. For my own ethical reasons, I practice awareness of the social, political and economic context within which I offer bodywork.
I use body-based art-making, education and therapies to think about social and political issues such as structural racism, colonial violence, cultural appropriation, the effects of capitalism on health, and the decline of the nation-state.
My performance work incorporates movement, music and text. My background is in modern and postmodern dance and ballet, and contemporary and classical musics and texts. Improvisational skills (based on sensory-awareness) and non-violent communication form the core of my approach to both performance training and body therapy/learning .
My therapeutic-educational bodywork uses manual and massage therapies (myofascial release, structural integration, acupressure, passive stretching) in conjunction with body-awareness education, drawing on Alexander Technique, Feldenkrais Method, Pilates and yoga.
My research interests include: Individual and collective trauma; whiteness and critical race studies; relationships (metaphorical and literal) between body-politic and personal bodymind; self and other; political economies of bodyminds.