Somatic Movement Practitioner.
Integrative Yoga Facilitator.
Intercultural Competence Trainer.
Interdisciplinary Researcher.
+44 74933 97563
Supporting Personal Transformation Through Somatic Practice.
Committed to Fostering Self- Empowerment
and Intercultural Competence.
Where breath flows, the body moves, and change begins.
Louise A Fielder, PhD.
Louise is an educator, somatic movement practitioner, and interdisciplinary researcher whose work integrates trauma-sensitive embodied practices with intercultural communication theory and contemporary neuroscience research. Her sensory-informed, integrative approach—shaped by Person-centred counselling and rooted in diverse yoga traditions—fosters personal insight, resilience, empowerment, and Intercultural Communication Competence, supporting both personal and relational transformation through culturally responsive, body-led enquiry.
With over 25 years’ experience leading dance, performing arts, and yoga initiatives across educational, community, and corporate settings, Louise works internationally in England, Aotearoa New Zealand, and Australia. She engages with learners across all academic levels, as well as individuals navigating substance use disorder (SUD), stroke rehabilitation, and Parkinson’s disease.
She has held leadership roles including Head of Department, Course Leader, and Head of Year across both secondary and tertiary education. As former Dance Education Director for the Royal New Zealand Ballet (RNZB), she developed innovative nationwide workshops and programmes that connected professional dance with schools and communities, and authored comprehensive teacher training manuals to support their delivery.
Louise’s career encompasses choreographing, directing, and performing in theatre and dance—with companies such as Fighting Fit Productions and the RNZB—and founding a 30-strong Afro-Fusion Contemporary Dance Collective that brought together youth and professional artists in collaborative performance. Earlier experience touring with the street theatre company Merchant Players and training with the LX team at Chichester Festival Theatre further grounded her diverse performing arts background, enriching her practical knowledge of stage lighting and production.
Deepening her commitment to culturally responsive and embodied practice, Louise spent a year across South East Asia immersing herself in diverse dance and yoga traditions, culminating in teacher training at the Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Dhanwantari Ashram in Neyyar Dam, India. Ongoing international professional development—including training with the Institute of Embodied Psychotherapy, coupled with work of somatic pioneers Sondra Fraleigh and Peter Levine—continue to inform her teaching and research.
Grounded in this embodied experience is a strong ethical sensitivity shaped by long-term engagement with intercultural communication. Her work draws on—and extends through embodied and experiential perspectives—the foundational theories of Edward T. Hall and Geert Hofstede, alongside contemporary work by Darla K. Deardorff.
Having formed close affiliations with members of Ngāti Tūwharetoa and Ngāti Toa iwi, Louise applies Māori-centred principles through a reflective Pākehā perspective. Her ethical awareness and commitment to culturally responsive practice led to her appointment to the University of Surrey Ethics Committee.
Louise is a recipient of multiple Post Primary Teaching Awards (PPTA), which have supported her research into the transformative potential of dance and somatic practice to foster Intercultural Dialogue and personal transformation within culturally diverse contexts.
Her doctoral research culminated in the creation of Intercultural Choreographic Dialogue (ICD)™—a radical framework that engenders communication competence and addresses unconscious bias, somatically, positioning the body as a site of knowledge, connection, and transformation.
Emerging from this work is Somatic Movement Exploration (SME)™—a developing initiative that fosters self-discovery, personal growth, and empowerment, while cultivating greater cultural sensitivity through embodied practice.
Central to Louise’s work is the concept of Ecotone—an experiential space of encounter and possibility, where balance and imbalance, tension and release, invite transformation. In this transitional space—shaped by imagination, playfulness, and reflexive inquiry— the gentle sifting of layered selfhood can emerge. Here, multiple ways of knowing can arise from the convergence of past, present, and future lived experience, opening pathways to insight, compassion, and relational attunement.
Integrating academic inquiry with lived, embodied experience, Louise offers an inclusive, ethically grounded, and culturally responsive approach to wellbeing, learning, and empowerment. Rooted in movement, guided by breath, and attuned to individual experience, her practice invites transformation as an organic process emerging from within.
