About Lerna
After graduating in Adult Education and then completing a Dance BA with Pedagogical Formation, she has spent more than 25 years working in schools, associations, and art centers as a teacher of creative dance, dance composition, and improvisation. Her early research in Turkey explored the impact of creative dance on children’s development. Her academic path later led her to pursue a Master’s degree in Movement, Mind, and Ecology at Dartington College of Arts in partnership with Plymouth University and Schumacher College.
From the very beginning
She began her dance teaching career in Istanbul in 1997 and has since taught creative dance, improvisation, dance composition, and creative dance pedagogy to students of all ages—from preschool to university—across Turkey and Europe. She has also developed teacher-training programs in this field.
In 2004, she created the Conceptual Dance Education program for preschoolers. In 2008, she presented Teaching Biology Lessons through Creative Dance at a democratic education conference in Germany. That same period, she became actively involved with the Alternative Education Association, contributing articles on education, and in 2015 she launched Turkey’s first Creative Dance Trainer Training program, rooted in alternative education approaches.
Parallel to her teaching, she began working as a theater actress in 1997 under the direction of Misak Toros in Istanbul, later serving as an assistant director. She went on to appear in TV commercials, experimental video performances, and dance films. Since 2001, she has participated in numerous local and international festivals as both dancer and choreographer, and has created choreographies for multidisciplinary improvisational performances, theater productions, and on-camera works.
Her artistic journey has been supported by residencies in Italy, Austria, the USA, Hungary, and Portugal. Between 2016 and 2018, she lived in Berlin, where she continued to develop her work as a dancer, teacher, and choreographer.
DANCER, TRAINEE, WRITER
In 2018, during her master’s studies in the field of contemporary dance in Istanbul, she conducted the research titled “The Effects of Creative Dance on Physical Activity, Creativity, Metacognitive Awareness on 10-Year-Old Children”, and in 2019 “Increasing Awareness and Creativity with Body-Focused Movement Education”, however she faced with academic censorship and discrimination. Afterwards on 2020, she started writing her first book “Creative Dance-Moving Pedagogy” which was published in 2022. In 2023, she completed her master’s thesis “Experiencing the Armenian Language through Ecosomatic, Interdisciplinary Performativities” in the UK, which was based on practice and culminated in a participatory performance.
Nowadays
In line with today’s needs at ethical, educational, aesthetic and ecological levels, she continues to design and implement body and creative dance-oriented trainings for different professional groups such as children, adults, teachers, physical therapists with a focus on creative dance pedagogy for the development of individuals to empower body-aware, holistically sensitive to life, lifelong learners, creative, self-confident and with a high sense of belonging.
She has recently continued her research on ecology, learning with the body, somatic practices and cultural learning connectivity in the UK. She is also a Torrance Creativity Test Practitioner with Pedagogical Formation and a certified Braindance instructor.
In addition to all these, she continues to take part in interdisciplinary performances as a dancer and choreographer.
Gratitude
She has been a student and then an instructor at Çatı Contemporary Dance Artists Association, which has contributed to her professional development from past to present; she has also participated in master classes on contemporary dance techniques, ballet, composition, improvisation, butho and somatic awareness in and beyond Europe. Some of the instructors who inspired her are Anne Green Gilbert, Berrak Yedek, Billie Hanne, Eric Kaile, Gaby Angis, Geyvan McMillan, Loretta Livingstone, Mathew Hopkins, Juan Kruz Diaz Esnaola, Tetsuro Fukuhara, Keith Hannesy, Mustafa Kaplan, Oktay Keresteci, Zeynep Tanbay, Faustin Linyekula Ngoy, Uğur Seyrek, Suprapto Suryodarmo, Susan Bauer and Dr. Rachel Sweeney.
