She was five years old when movement became her language. A scholarship to the Alvin Ailey School of Dance followed — training in ballet, modern, African, and jazz — before she went on to dance professionally in companies across Massachusetts and New York.

A knee injury at sixteen never fully healed. She kept dancing anyway. She earned her Bachelor of Arts at Amherst College, studying alongside peers at Mt. Holyoke and Smith, and received a scholarship through the National Dance Institute to become a certified dance educator. Movement was always the through-line.

Then came the University of Michigan, and a PhD in Comparative Literature. Somewhere between dissertation chapters, she pressed play on a Windsor Pilates DVD at home. The results were, in her words, so profound that she immediately pursued certification in mat and machine Pilates — completing it in 2007.

In 2009, at the birth of her son Reza, she created Mamilates — one of the first Mommy & Me Pilates formats in the country. A cross between Gymboree and Windsor Pilates, she described it. She taught it in NYC, Long Island, and Buffalo before eventually bringing the work south to Columbia, SC.

Today she teaches at Club Pilates in Forest Acres, holds an appointment as Assistant Professor at Allen University, and runs Pilates & Mommy as a living expression of everything she has learned about bodies, resilience, and what women are capable of.