About MBR

Mary Abrams

Photos by Amanda Lascon

Mary Abrams, MA, RSME loves moving, learning, and being in business. Since 1984 she has professionally explored her passions as a dancer/choreographer and somatic movement teacher. Mary offers dynamic, detailed attention to breath, sensation, emotions, expression, and creative process. With curiosity and enjoyment, Mary supports groups and individuals in environments that enhance creativity, healing, and transformation through body-self-awareness and movement explorations. As founder/director of Moving Body Resources she provides a physical space for this work.

Mary’s experience includes working with pre-natal-birth, dying-death, aging concerns, post-surgical rehabilitation, chronic illness, injury, trauma, paralysis, and ongoing personal development/ self-care. She began teaching somatic movement in 1996, offering Continuum classes from 1996-2014. She continues to develop her unique expression of transformational movement classes leading groups across the USA and internationally. From 2009-2017 she held a leadership role on the USA section of the MA Dance & Somatic Well-being: Connections to the Living Body from the University of Central Lancashire, Preston, England, and continues to teach on the UK campus.

She also teaches on the Continuum training at the Somatic Academy of Berlin, Germany and mentors people interested in becoming Somatic Movement Educators and/ or Continuum Teachers.

Mary is a Registered Somatic Movement Educator (RSME) with the International Somatic Movement Education and Therapy Association (ISMETA), and holds a masters degree (Goddard College) in Consciousness Studies with a focus on embodied movement practice and theory. She apprenticed in Continuum Movement with its founder Emilie Conrad from 1994-2014 and was among the first group of people Emilie Conrad and Susan Harper Authorized as Continuum MovementTeachers in 1999. She continues to dialogue with Susan Harper (Continuum Montage), and explore human being theory (Affect-script theory) and Epistemics, with Emilie’s long-time collaborator, Gary David, PhD. All her studies are valuable resources for tracking what is, being open to the emerging unexpected, and for discovering new meaning, and learning to extend presence into the world.

She served as Co-Chair with Lauren Abramson on the Board of Directors of the Silvan S. Tomkins Institute (SSTI) from 2013-2016 (www.tomkins.org).

Podcast Interviews:

Alumni Spotlight: Mary Abrams

Universal Dancer Podcast:
YouTube Video Link:
https://youtu.be/3s_fJJ9LJZE
Podcast:
https://anchor.fm/leslie-zehr/episodes/Mary-Abrams–Founder-and-Director-of-Moving-Body-Resources-e1ecbdl

Interview of Mary Abrams by Liz Koch, December 2021

MOVING BODY RESOURCES: Talking with Mary Abrams (youtube.com)

From 2002-2011 she served on the Board of Directors of the International Somatic Movement Education & Therapy Association (ISMETA), as board president from 2005-2009. She continues working for ISMETA as their Government Relations Consultant to the Federation of Therapeutic Massage, Bodywork, and Somatic Practice Organizations.

From 1993-2002 Mary served on the Board of Directors of Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church (NYC), and from 1985-1987 on the Board of Directors of the Minnesota Dance Alliance (Minneapolis, MN).

From 1981-1997 Mary choreographed and taught dance in Minnesota, Iowa, India, and New York receiving grant support. She holds a B.A. in Dance from St. Olaf College, formally studied dance for over 30 years, and performs occasionally in New York City and other places.

Publications by Mary Abrams include:

Abrams, M. (2020), ‘Finding Heart in the Well of Being’, Dance, Movement & Spiritualities, UK: Intellect Books, Volume 7 Numbers 1 & 2, pp. 87-103.

Abrams, M. (2017) Being Beautiful, MegaZEN Journal, Be Hive of Healing, Agoura Hills, CA., pp. 38-39.

Abrams, M. (2011), Consciousness as Embodied Movement: Exploring intimate and more effective ways of living together. Plainfield, VT: Goddard College Library.

Abrams, M. (2011), Feeling Moving: Wandering through the flesh of personal and human development, USA Body Psychotherapy Association Journal, vol. 10, issue 2.

Olsen, Andrea (2022), ‘Sensations and Emotions with Mary Abrams, founder of Moving Body Resources’, Moving Between Worlds: A guide to embodied living and communicating, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, chap. 20, pp. 134-139.

Williamson, A. (2016), Somatically inspired movement and prepatriarchal religious symbolism, Journal of Dance, Somatics, and Spiritualities, vol. 2, issue 3, pp. 323-355.

Williamson, A. (2017), with Mary Abrams and Sondra Fraleigh, ‘Falling in love with language’, in S. Fraleigh (ed.), Dancing World: Phenomenologies of the Body in Performance, Illinois: University of Illinois Press.