Maura Tousignant is a movement artist who has performed dance professionally on both coasts of the United States and in India. Her choreography and improvisation creations focus on marrying the ecstatic and the sober, introducing the audience to the experience of trance, and offering the performance of movement meditation as a sacred practice. Maura studied with master dancer Banafsheh Sayyad for seven years to become the first certified performer and teacher of the Dance of Oneness®, which draws from Sufi trance dance rituals and Sama (Sufi whirling), Persian dance, flamenco, Middle Eastern tribal dances, Tai Chi, and contemporary dance. Maura’s experiences practicing Sufism in Turkey and her love of Rumi’s poetry deeply guide her in her dancing and living. Maura has also studied and performed modern dance, folkloric dances from Bolivia, Peru, and Brazil, hip-hop, and salsa.
Maura practices and teaches vinyasa yoga. She received her 200hr RYT certification in 2015 after studying with Ally Hamilton and Kate Duyn Cariati through the world-renowned studio, Yogis Anonymous, and has been teaching since graduating. Her practice informs her investigation of stillness in motion in her creative work. Maura teaches yoga to offer an accessible way for students to work toward becoming radiantly healthy. Yoga provides a potential path for students to find union between the body and the mind, to discover clarity and peace in themselves.
Maura’s interest in embodiment practices, spirituality, and mysticism emerged while in undergraduate studies. Maura received High Distinction upon graduating from the University of Virginia, where she studied as an Echols Scholar in the subjects of Comparative Literature, Middle Eastern Studies, and Dance. She received multiple international research grants and awards as an undergraduate and wrote her thesis in Comparative Litearture on Rumi's ecstatic state during his creation of Divan-e Shams.
Following some years focusing on dance and yoga, Maura shifted her orientation toward somatic and depth psychology. Maura attained her M.A. in Counseling Psychology: Marriage and Family Therapy, Clinical Counseling, and Depth Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute, and she now practices as a licensed psychotherapist, weaving together somatic, relational, and Jungian approaches to therapy, with a specialized focus on trauma and grief.
Maura has studied dance for camera and works with site specific improvisational dance in her dance for camera films. Maura is driven to create opportunities to unite art, activism, and spirituality, in her own work and throughout the world.