Marie Carstens graduated from the University of Missouri-Kansas City with a BFA in Dance, received her Master of Science in Dance/Movement Therapy from Hunter College and continues to pursue her passion for expressive movement and its transformative power through the realms of dance performance as well as dance movement therapy.  As a dancer/ choreographer and therapist Marie's philosophy is that dance is a celebration of life.  Dance allows us to move the embodied expression of all we experience onto the stage or into the therapeutic space.  We move through and are moved by the vast array of feelings we experience and all of our attachments and associations to those feelings. Marie has added massage therapy to her body of work as another way of aspiring to

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Marie is a classically trained dancer and choreographer. After graduate school she found a home in the early modern dance technique of Isadora Duncan. Isadora Duncan is considered the mother of modern dance and an earmark of this period was a shift of the dancer from an objective tool of the choreographer to the expressive agent as choreographer/dancer.  This new subjective and expressive modern dance was the springboard for dance/movement therapy, a psychotherapy that understands a bi-directional relationship between mind and body.  We acknowledge our bodily selves as an expressive canvas and as we move we paint the space around us, molding and carving in relationship with our world.  All we do has both function and expression; how we do what we do speaks volumes.