A Career Built Across Words, Movement, and Media.

Introduction

As I reflect on my professional life, I can’t really separate it from my identity as a dancer.

I take breaks from writing to put on Marina or Kinneret and practice in front of the mirror. I’ve basically made a tiny dance studio next to my home office, which means I can go from editing an article to working on a turn in about thirty seconds.

Performance and movement have been somewhere in my life for as long as I can remember. Even back at my first job at Disneyland, I was working in a place built around performance, storytelling, bodies in space, and knowing where an audience is looking.

Now I spend a lot of my professional life helping other people feel comfortable in front of a camera. And I notice things because I dance.

I notice tension in somebody’s shoulders. I notice when they suddenly relax because we’ve gotten past the canned answer and into something they actually care about. I notice how a person occupies a frame. After filming myself dancing for years, I’ve also developed a pretty good instinct for what looks good on camera, when a shot starts to feel static, and when something needs to change visually before the viewer gets bored.

My work is very laptop-based and cerebral. Writing, research, editing, strategy, timelines. But I embody my work anyway. I can’t separate the two, and I don’t particularly want to.

Sometimes the connection is extremely practical. I’ve built websites and filmed original content for dance studios. I’ve designed posters for community yoga classes. I filmed a live performance for a musical artist and later had to turn footage from several angles into one energetic piece. I was also filming the lead singer from close range, and because I understand performance, I had a sense of where to position myself without flattening what he was doing onstage. Where his movement was going. When to get closer. When to get out of the way.

Those skills are harder to put into a neat little software section on a résumé, but they show up in the work.

Writing Starts With Paying Attention

Writing works similarly for me.

The part I like most is finding the thing underneath the obvious thing. Someone tells you what their organization does. Fine. But why do they care? Why did they start doing it? What happened that made this issue impossible for them to ignore? What does the audience misunderstand about it?

That’s usually where the actual story is.

Interviewing people is one of my favorite parts of communications work because there is often a visible moment when someone stops answering like they’re being interviewed. Their face changes. Their language changes. They start telling you the story instead of presenting information to you.

I love that moment!

Writing gives me somewhere to put what I notice. Dance probably has something to do with why I notice it in the first place.

Dancing Is Pointless, and That’s the Point

Dancing alone in my room is one of my favorite ways to dance.

No audience. No client. No deliverable. No metrics attached to it.

If we’re being extremely productivity-minded, maybe I burned some calories. Maybe I closed my Apple Watch rings. Otherwise, nothing measurable happened.

Good.

A lot of life is “wasting” time.

Sitting under palm trees at the beach. Listening to your friend tell you a story you’ve already heard because you love her voice and wouldn’t dream of stopping her. Rubbing your dog’s belly for 30 minutes. Spending hours with your family doing everything and nothing because time with them is the entire point.

I like working. I actually like having obligations to people and to organizations, to the mission. Ever since I was young, I’ve gotten a lot of satisfaction from working hard toward something, helping somebody else reach a goal, solving an editing problem, finishing a piece of writing, watching a campaign finally come together.

But satisfaction isn’t only happening inside my brain.

I feel accomplishment physically. Stress, too. Grief. Frustration. Excitement. That awful stuck feeling when you’ve been staring at the same problem for an hour and nothing is moving.

Sometimes I need to think harder.

But if that doesn’t work, more often then not what I actually need is to put on a song and move through the sticking point. Sitting back down at my desk, breathless and heart beating, the creativity flows through me again.

Dancing Gives Me an Edge in My Work

I used to think of dancing and professional work as separate categories. The older I get, the less convincing that distinction feels.

There’s some research behind this connection, although I don’t need to pretend my bedroom dance breaks are a clinical intervention.

A 2026 study comparing expert dancers, amateur dancers, and non-dancers found that the dancers performed better on measures of creative thinking, with the strongest performance among experts. The researchers discuss this through the idea of “embodied creativity,” where movement and sensorimotor experience are connected to creative thought.

Research on dance and movement therapy also suggests that movement can support emotional regulation, although that literature is studying structured therapeutic practices, not somebody blasting Marina between emails.

Still, that relationship makes intuitive sense to me.

Dance asks you to make decisions constantly. Timing. Space. Rhythm. Restraint. When to repeat something and when repetition has become boring. When to hold still. When the music is telling you one thing but doing the expected thing would be less interesting.

That sounds suspiciously similar to editing.

Movement gives me a way to clear out whatever the work leaves behind. Sometimes that’s tension from a difficult interview, a client problem I can’t quite solve, or a piece that refuses to come together. Other times it’s excitement: landing a new client, finishing something I’m proud of, or watching the numbers finally start to move.

Sometimes I dance because something went wrong.

Sometimes because something went very, very right.

I Don’t Really Want to Pick One

Writer. Dancer. Communications strategist. Video editor. Interviewer. Brand architect.

I’ve spent enough time trying to make all of those things fit politely into professional categories.

At this point, I’m more interested in what happens because they overlap.

Dance has changed the way I understand cameras. Writing has changed the way I interview people. Interviewing has changed how I think about marketing. Marketing has made me obsessed with audiences. Feminist studies taught me to pay attention to who gets represented, who gets flattened, and who gets to tell the story in the first place.

And then sometimes I close my laptop, turn the music up, and dance around my apartment for no productive reason whatsoever.

That belongs in the story too.