About Shelley Hainer

My arts education started formally as a child in ballet at The Metropolitan Opera House School of Ballet. Next, I attended High School of Performing Arts (drama) and was a member of the New York City Theater Workshop for Students, a formative time in the avant-garde, improvisation, and political anti-war, guerilla street theater scene. We performed Lehrstuck the learning operas of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. Our director recommended Kenyon College, where I graduated in the first class of women with a B.A. in Theater. 

My exploration in movement sciences, sports, and fitness led to graduate studies in Exercise Physiology at Queens College (CUNY), Master of Science. In 1984, on a trip to Paris, I met Therese Bertherat, author of The Body Has Its Reasons. A student in the lineage of Elsa Gindler, she named her work anti-gymnastics. At our meeting over lunch, she invited me to her first formation, a professional training. I certified in Anti-gymnastics/Therese Bertherat, 1984–86 (Paris, France).  

It was then that I found another Gindler teacher in New York City to study with, Carola Speads, author of Ways to Better Breathing. Speads studied directly with Gindler, as her right hand, and alongside Charlotte Selver, who created the Sensory Awareness Foundation, both first-generation teachers. All my teachers in sensory experiments learned and developed under the lineage of Elsa Gindler, who is considered the innovator of somatic education, bringing mind, body, heart, along with a meditative presence, into the broader field of physical re-education and physical therapy. 

The revolution was to bring forth change from the inside, an approach radically different from the common regime of calisthenic exercise. Instead, movement experiments, experiential and curious, asking questions and exploring, were the rigorous foundation. Bertherat's other influences encouraged more threads of connection and ways to work with the body: Francoise Mezier's theories through the science of observation identified the integrity of the skeletal-muscular system; Dr. Alfred Tomatis, the importance of the listening ear, sound, language and communication, socializing and using one’s voice.

This richness of study and practice inspired me to organize and produce two conferences. In 1988, I created a two-day conference, “De-Stressing the Workplace: Movement Techniques for Modern Times.” In 1989, at the request of New York University, I produced “Life in Motion,” a four-day professional conference, a first in the newly acknowledged field of Somatic Education, supported by the Dance Education Department and the Center for Career Development. Thirty-five modalities were presented with over 200 professionals in attendance. 

In the 1990s, I supported a community of 5,000 as Community Affairs Director (Waterside Plaza, New York City), then transitioned to Executive Search Consultant, another people-oriented career, a generalist at the start, then a specialist recruiting Chief Executives in the Non-Profit Sector at Korn/Ferry International. 

I joined the Sensory Awareness Foundation in 2015 at their New York City conference. In 2021, I was invited to join the “Leaders Guild of Sensory Awareness Foundation”. I'm honored and proud to be among nearly 100 colleagues worldwide. Sensory experiments emerge in my background as the very essence, the common thread in performance, writing, play, art-making, connection and freedom. It is a thoroughly relational practice.