Katy Slany is an artist, educator, and Registered Somatic Movement Therapist and Educator (ISMETA). Her work is an ongoing research project at the intersection of possibility, embodiment, and collective imagination and liberation. She facilitates containers for physiological change through nervous system literacy, relational attunement, and somatic practice.

 

At the center of her work lies a lived experience of chronic illness, which became the catalyst for her somatic journey. Her practice is also informed by a lineage of rupture, migration and movement: as an unsettled settler living liminally on the unceded and stolen lands of the Taino people, Xaymaca (Kingston, Jamaica), as well as the traditional territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam Indian Band), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish Nation), səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh Nation) and lək̓ʷəŋən (Esquimalt and Songhees Nations).

Through these layers of personal and collective history, Katy’s practice explores how our bodies carry the imprint of historical and social forces, and how awareness and practice can release these patterns, allowing us to come back into relation with one another, the land we live on and our own being. By changing how we hold the past in our bodies, we open space for both personal and collective transformation.

 

Through education, art, and somatic practice, Katy supports new pathways toward connection, belonging, and embodied change.