The lessons and legacy of my time working at Luna Dance Institute have been formative in my life as a professional and as a mother. I began working as an intern with Luna in 2003, became an employee into 2004. I worked as a development associate, and dance teaching artist for special needs preschool and elementary school classrooms as well as in the MPACT program. Luna’s mission of bringing creativity, equality and community to every child through dance aligns so deeply with my own professional and personal goals that each role I held for Luna allowed me to become more fully myself. In particular one aspect of my work for Luna which I valued enormously was the way the structure of the organization embraced each employee as a multifaceted individual who could simultaneously hold multiple roles. At Luna, everyone was an artist valued for their creative input, an administrator or coordinator valued for their intellectual and organization contributions, a teacher valued for what we had to give to others, a student valued for what we could learn, and a member of a community valued for how we worked together. I felt uniquely embraced in my working life as whole person; body, mind and spirit.

Now as a self-employed mother of three, I refuse to give up on that holistic integrity to what is possible in my life and career.

I have gone on to become a registered Dance Movement Therapist and currently work individually with young children experience developmental delay, autism, ADHD, anxiety, attachment difficulty and early trauma. I also continue to teach attachment focused parent-child dance classes, which my own children, ages 6, 4 and 2, have all attended with me. I teach a dance program for people with Parkinson’s disease and I teach dance in special needs preschool classroom. Through my multiple roles and contexts, I carry the lessons and memories from my work at Luna. I am deeply grateful for the mentorship I received from Nancy and Patricia as well as for how my experiences working at Luna shaped who I am today as a parent, teacher, and therapist.