Sapana Doshi, PhD (she/they) is a mind-body teacher committed to healing, justice, and liberation from the personal to the global. Her work and interests bridge many worlds–academia and activism, meditation and dance, body and spirit–and her training as an Open Floor teacher has touched most of these.
As a professor of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Merced, she researches and teaches on global capitalism, body politics, and social mobilization. She has integrated Open Floor movement resources into her university teaching, which couples critical thinking and social justice analysis with embodied liberation pedagogy as a decolonizing approach to higher education.
Sapana also holds community dance space in Oakland, California, and founded Freedom Dance Collective which offers movement meditation for People of the Global Majority (Black, Indigenous and People of Color). Her experience as a queer daughter of South Asian immigrants roots her commitment to collective liberation and embodied solidarity. Sapana has also been deeply influenced and humbled by her practice of Vipassana meditation since 2000.