Kristy is a master Pilates practitioner with over fifteen years of Pilates-teaching experience. She began her instructor training while in her first year at the College of Charleston after returning from Budapest, Hungary, where she trained with the Hungarian National Ballet. Kristy completed a rigorous two-year classical Pilates certification, rich in anatomy and bio-mechanical mindfulness, with Karen Sanzo of Pilates Unlimited in Dallas, Texas. Since becoming a certified Pilates instructor, Kristy has facilitated multiple full-apparatus and mat instructor certification programs, educating classical Pilates instructors who now teach both regionally around the northeast and internationally. Additionally, Kristy created a Pilates curriculum for asthmatics in partnership with researchers from the Yale University School of Medicine, and developed the professional instructional video that was used as the primary intervention method in this study. Kristy has also pursued various opportunities for continuing education to deepen her specialization in pelvic-floor rehabilitation and the post-partum body.

Kristy completed a three-year Master of Arts in Counseling after which she worked as a psychiatric assistant at the Yale University Child Study Center. She is also a certified birth and neonatal bereavement doula. In her work as a doula she supported and cared for women and families throughout the prenatal, birth, and postpartum processes. In this work, she cared for families through miscarriages, stillbirths, and high-risk birth scenarios. Kristy created a therapeutic space for families to begin the work of processing complex experiences and grief in a non-clinical counseling format.

At OBP, Kristy serves as a somatic therapist and wellness coach. In her work as a somatic therapist, she utilizes Pilates methodology, breath practices, and consensual touch, as well as her psychotherapeutic education and experience to provide a body-centered, awareness-based therapeutic space of inquiry, exploration, and healing. As a wellness coach, Kristy crafts individualized plans based on a client’s temperament, preferences, challenges, and life stage to strategically meet their overall wellness goals.

Kristy approaches every Pilates session she teaches with openness and curiosity about how her clients will arrive, settle, and develop over the shared hour. She holds a profound reverence for both the space she shares with her clients and her clients’ dedication and commitment to their personal wellness. She knows Pilates to be physically transformational through her own rehabilitation after an ankle injury ended her professional ballet career. Having been an instructor of Pilates ever since this injury (and a practitioner of Pilates since she was 13), Kristy intimately knows the ways in which Pilates meets a body where it is, always providing room for growth, healing, and transformation.

Kristy enjoys working with a wide variety of bodies, abilities, gender expressions, identities, and life stages, including persons with acute or chronic injuries, various physical limitations, athletes, pre- and post-partum persons, those with specific physical goals in mind, those curious about their own becoming, and those with a simple desire to move mindfully, strengthen, and sweat.