About Josie Bray

For my official bio, go here.

My Story

I was born in a Black neighborhood in Chicago (where my grandfather settled after escaping the coal mines of West Virginia) and raised by activist parents in a White papermill town in rural Maine.  I’ve split my adult life between Boston and New York City.

I’m a survivor of childhood sexual abuse and trauma, which has informed my healing path and training.

Ever since I can remember, I’ve had an awareness of race, class, gender, and an instinct to make change in a world that is stubbornly obsessed with hierarchies.

My original training was in modern dance and theatre at Emerson College.  All of my work is rooted in curiosity about our human bodies and how they tell our human stories.  My work explores how shifting those stories can be used to change our experiences of the world.

My primary artistic forms are theatre, movement, and writing. My main somatic modalities are Yoga, Pilates, Franklin Method, and healing exercise.  The nerdy scientist in me works with a synthesis of functional anatomy and trauma research.

I connect spirituality into my work with meditation, prayer, and an exploration of the subtle body (including the Chakra system).  Being in community, reducing harm, moving toward equity, and finding better ways to be together drive my learning in social justice.

Over time, my work has become a synthesis of these interests.

In my early career, everyone told me that as a starving artist, I had to constantly scrape together a livelihood.  For years, I held multiple part-time jobs — teaching middle school here, running a dance studio there, directing a high school musical on Tuesdays while teaching Pilates on Wednesdays.

As I did my own healing work around PTSD and depression, I began to see that my work in the arts, my teaching, my training in the body, and my relationship to systems of oppression were not separate but were pieces of something bigger.  I began to understand that there is, in fact, an art to healing both individually and collectively. I recognized that the art-making I was interested in shared that same quality of healing– by way of overcoming adversity, building resilience, and integrating deeper understandings into a better world.

I believe that we can choose to heal.  That what we do matters.  That health is contagious.  That we can create change that ripples out into the world and makes it a better place for us to be together.

Ultimately, the work I do is in service to building new futures; healing ourselves through new narratives, and through stories that have been hidden or silenced; healing ourselves through work in our bodies, our words, our energy, our actions, and our communities.

I believe the world needs deeper listening, more song, joyful dancing, and for us to lift each others’ voices.

I believe that when we tune into our bodies and breath, we can transform who we are in the world and have better capacity to show up for each other.  I believe that we learn more from our mistakes than from getting it right, and that honesty and reconciliation are transformative practices.

I’ve worked on Broadway and in church basements; I’ve taught in under-funded middle schools, in luxury fitness centers, in universities, at Yoga studios, and at the Y.  I’ve been in spaces where I am the only white person and in spaces of only white people.  I’ve worked with people without homes, with elite dancers and figure skaters, with people who cannot walk, with queer and trans people, with wall street executives, with elders, with youth.