From the age of 5 I was doing ballet classes and by 11 years old I knew I wanted to be a professional dancer. I continued my training until I was 21, completing my Honours in Dance with Link Dance Company in 2009. After graduation, I worked as a freelance dancer, choreographer, and teacher throughout Australia and in 2013 I moved to London to continue dancing in Europe and the UK.

Whilst living there, I met my now husband Rob who was teaching Pilates at the time and I started to consider a career change. Around this time I was also teaching Barre classes at Ten Pilates and then for Barrecore. Rob was impressed with my anatomical knowledge and asked me to assist in rehabilitating some of his private clients. This professional collaboration would sew the seeds of a shared vision to run a movement education space together in the future. A place for people to learn why movement is so important for overall health and longevity and how to fall in love with movement and respect their bodies for what they enable them to do. 

In 2016, we moved to Melbourne together and I completed my comprehensive Pilates training through Tensegrity Training, with an incredible mentor Bruce Hilderbrand. When he was ready to sell his Richmond studio a year later, Rob and I took the plunge and founded Movementality and our vision came to life. As part of this vision we established Movers & Shakers in 2018, a monthly workshop series aimed at connecting practitioners from different studios and training methods, to inspire curiosity and challenge the status quo in our industry.

In 2019, I felt a desire to deepen my practice and better understand how lived experience and emotion can influence chronic pain and movement, and so I studied my Graduate Diploma in Clinical Somatics and Dance Movement Therapy with Tensegrity Training. This profoundly affected my teaching, especially as it coincided with the COVID pandemic a year later and the combination of Pilates and Somatic Movement Therapy has become a focal point underpinning my entire teaching practice. 

In 2021, I was invited to be a conditioning specialist for the prestigious Australian Ballet School in Melbourne and I held that role until I gave birth to my daughter Darcey in the November. In 2023, I presented a pre-natal Pilates workshop for the Pilates Association Australia Conference with my colleague Kimi Broadbent and I am a regular contributor in The Pilates Journal.

I love blending my 20+ years of dance training and experience with my Pilates and Somatic Movement Therapy knowledge. My teaching is heavily rooted in pain science, is trauma informed and focuses on nervous system regulation as a gateway for optimal physical, mental and emotional health. What better way to do that than through movement!

Connect with Ash here - Move Mentality