I’m Leah, a dance artist and embodiment educator with an insatiable curiosity for movement and expression.
I’ve been a mover my whole life. Sports, figure skating, gymnastics, Irish step dance, hula, musical theater, yoga, hip hop, ballet, snowboarding…I wanted to try everything. But I didn’t have the typical trajectory into professional contemporary dance. I took relatively little technical dance training until adulthood, and I went to college to study theater with the intention of becoming an actor.
What fascinated me most about acting was physical transformation and stage combat. I felt most at home in roles that let me become something entirely different from myself: a creature, an entity, someone who moved through the world in another way. After college, though, I began to feel limited by the theater world. I struggled to find roles that spoke to me or made room for my queerness.
Then one day I realized I wasn’t daydreaming about acting. I was constantly daydreaming about dancing. I thought, Oh shit. I think my body is trying to tell me something.
I didn’t want to spend my life wondering, “What if I’d really tried? What if I believed in myself?” I was 25, with limited formal training, but something deep in my bones was urging me toward dance. I decided to listen.
And boy, am I glad I did. I loved every minute of the classes I took, even when I felt like a beginner. I threw myself into as many as I could afford, practiced outside of class, and kept showing up to the ones that challenged me. Slowly but surely, I grew.
In 2016, I booked my first paid dance gig. More projects followed. I went to auditions, took opportunities, and kept imagining a future in which I could dance with a company and travel the world. It seemed like a dream reserved for dancers younger and more experienced than me, but I stubbornly kept walking toward it.
In 2019, I joined Khambatta Dance Company and got to do exactly that. I toured with them to Germany, France, India, Korea, Indonesia, and across the US, while continuing to freelance and create my own work. One day I looked around and realized I was living the life I’d dreamed of.
And yet, some of my most joyful moments in dance weren’t onstage. They happened at the weekly ecstatic dances I attended religiously: moments of pure flow, play, and personal expression. I became curious about how I found my way into that state. I began developing concrete tools for responding to music, making choices, and finding new possibilities in movement.
Eventually, I started sharing those tools in workshops with the ecstatic dance community. The response showed me how many people were hungry for a way into movement that felt expressive, welcoming, and their own.
That’s the heart of what I offer now. You don’t need a lifetime of training, the “right” body, refined technique, or a perfect sense of rhythm to begin. I know what it’s like to come to dance by an unexpected path. I also know how much can open up when you give yourself permission to follow your curiosity and listen to what your body has been trying to tell you.
