Marisa is a veteran teacher, guide, and mentor.  She is also an accomplished and award-winning composer of music-theatre, oratorios, choral works, and more.  (For her professional bio and CV, click!)

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For over two decades she has lived her life unwaveringly devoted to deeper and deeper creative, vocal, musical and pedagogical practice. 

Fiercely following her soul’s calling and pursuing her passions since she was a child, she began singing and playing piano at age five, acting at age six, and composing her own (unruly, dissonant, chaotic!)  piano pieces at age nine.

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At the same time, certain experiences lodged themselves in her body, expressing via panic attacks, chronic pain, disordered eating, and a debilitating insomnia that began as a young teenager and lasted for years. 

Needless to say, this impacted her breathing and her singing and her Existing.   

While on the one hand music, composing, writing songs, and acting and singing provided ways to express a rich inner world full of spiritual longing, at the same time (and despite being a naturally gifted singer),  singing began feeling more and more cumbersome and unsatisfying.  Sometimes it was even physically painful.

 A professional singer early on, many of the best of the best teachers tried to  “help” her via all sorts of mechanistic directives about how to manipulate her body in order to sing better.  

But none of these instructions “worked,” except sometimes as a bandaid. In fact, such directives made everything feel more difficult.  And that made things worse because it compounded her already present story that there was something wrong with her.  

So many people carry this story about themselves...

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