Olive Bieringa (Program & Educational Director)

Olive is a dance maker, somatic movement therapist and cultural producer from Wellington, New Zealand who lives in Oslo, Norway. She is a Registered ISMETA Somatic Movement Therapist and Educator, a Certified Practitioner and Teacher of Body-Mind Centering®, Shiatsu practitioner and certified DanceAbility teacher, working with dancers of all abilities. She holds an MFA in Performance and New Media from Long Island University in Brooklyn, NY and a BA from the European Dance Development Center in the Netherlands and is a Doctoral Candidate at Uniarts Helsinki.

Olive teaches internationally in Body-Mind Centering® trainings, universities, festivals and dance companies. For over twenty-five years she has been collaborating with Otto Ramstad as the BodyCartography Project creating dances, performances, films, installations, and festivals with the vital materiality of our bodies and minds and the more than human world to co-create live experiences that generate re-enchantment, relationship, and presence.

Otto Ramstad (Co-Educational Director)

Otto is a dance and video artist and Certified Practitioner & Teacher of Body-Mind Centering®. He began studying BMC^® in 1981 at six years old with his first dance and BMC^® teacher Suzanne River. He has a BA in Dance, Improvisation, and the Moving Image from Goddard College and an MA in Choreography from Oslo National Academy of the Arts in 2019.

For over twenty-five years he has been collaborating with Olive Bieringa as the BodyCartography Project creating performances, films, installations, and festivals internationally. He studied for many years with Steve Paxton and teaches Material for the Spine. Otto teaches internationally in Body-Mind Centering® trainings, universities, festivals and dance companies. He has performed in the work of DD Dorvillier, Miguel Gutierrez, Shelton Mann, Karen Nelson, Lisa Schmitt, Scott Wells, and Kitt Johnson.

Kim Sargent-Wishart (Administrative Director)

Kim is an educator, researcher & artist specializing in somatic and contemplative practices, including dance improvisation, somatic writing and contemplative photography. She is a Certified Practitioner (1999) and Teacher (2019) of Body-Mind Centering®, Infant Developmental Movement Educator, Certified Teacher of BodyMind Dancing™, and a Registered Somatic Movement Educator (ISMETA). She teaches locally, online, and on the SME programs at Sonder and Moving Within in the US.

Kim holds a BA with Honors in Dance (Wesleyan University, 1987), Massage Therapist certification (Connecticut Center for Massage Therapy, 1990), and an apprentice-based Pilates instructor training (San Francisco, 1993). She completed a PhD in Performance Studies at Victoria University (Melbourne, 2016) with a focus on somatics, experiential embryology and Tibetan Buddhist philosophies in creative practice. Her writings have been published in several journals and anthologies. She is the co-founder of ASTER Association and co-editor of The Art of Embodiment. She lives on Wadawurrung country, Bellarine Peninsula, Victoria. kimsargentwishart.com

Amy Matthews has been teaching movement since 1994. She is a Certified Laban Movement Analyst, a Body-Mind Centering®  Teacher, an Infant Developmental Movement Educator, and a yoga therapist and yoga teacher.

Amy is the co-founder and co-director of Babies Project with Sarah Barnaby, former director of The Breathing Project, and co-author of the best-selling book Yoga Anatomy (Human Kinetics).

Amy is Program Director at Sonder Movement Project offering the SME & IDME Programs in the US. She taught for four years with Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen in Berkeley CA, and was on the faculty of the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies for 10 years.

Amy studied extensively with Irene Dowd, and participated in Gil Hedley’s dissection workshops many times. She has studied yoga with a variety of teachers in the Desikachar and Iyengar traditions, and full-contact karate with Sensei Michelle Gay. She teaches embodied anatomy and movement workshops for programs in the US and internationally, and works privately integrating Laban Movement Analysis, Bartenieff Fundamentals, yoga, BMC and Proprioceptive Neuromuscular Facilitation (PNF). movementpractices.com

Friederike Tröscher lives in Rhöndorf (near Cologne), Germany. Her background is in occupational therapy, new dance, contact improvisation and rebirthing, with further experience in Biodynamic Massage, dance therapy and meditation practice. For many years she has worked with children with developmental challenges.

She was trained at the School for Body-Mind Centering® under the direction of Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen from 1995-2002. Since 1995 she teaches this work in different contexts (workshops, conferences, dance and music programs in universities) and is involved with holding the licensed trainings since 2003.

She is Program Director and part of the founding team of moveus (Germany) since 2007. She offers workshops, individual sessions and a one-year BMC training in Cologne.

Carla Bottiglieri is an independent researcher in somatic methodologies, with a special focus on the critical and clinical dimensions of gestural imaginaries. She is a Certified Practitioner and Teacher of Body-Mind Centering®, an Infant Developmental Movement Educator and a Registered Somatic Movement Educator. She also trained as Rolfing®/Structural Integration Practitioner under the mentorship of Hubert Godard.

She holds a Masters Degree in Aesthetics from the University of Salerno (IT) and a Master in Performing Arts/Dance Studies from the University of Paris 8 (FR).

Carla teaches internationally in Body-Mind Centering® trainings, universities, and cultural organizations. She has worked with artists and theatre companies across Europe as a dancer, performer, assistant researcher and trainer.

She is currently involved in the Making Connections project, an ongoing shared laboratory of somatics resources for children with disabilities and their families and caregivers.

Together with Thomas Greil, she founded minima somatica, a nucleus of practice and research in somatic approaches to movement and care, currently based in Faenza Italy.

Sarah Barnaby is a certified Teacher, Practitioner and Infant Developmental Movement Educator (IDME) through the School for Body-Mind Centering, and a registered Somatic Movement Educator and Therapist (ISMETA). She is also certified in Embodied Developmental Movement and Yoga (EDMY) and Embodied Anatomy and Yoga (EAY), Body-Mind Centering^® programs that teach developmental movement principles and an embodied approach to anatomy in relation to yoga practice.

Sarah teaches developmental movement to babies of all ages – from infants to elders – in NYC. She is the co-founder and co-director of Babies Project with Amy Matthews. She is trained as a post-partum doula and in the Newborn Behavioral Observation (NBO) System.

She explores and teaches anatomy and physiology from a somatic perspective, and enjoys diving into science-y rabbit holes around such topics as the origins of life, evolution, embryology, complex systems, and cell biology. She collaborates with Satu Palukangas as Critical Somatics.
sarahbarnaby.com