about me

Ana Bernardes

In 1998 I started dancing and studying Psychology and I walked these 2 paths separately until they began to get intertwined.

As a Vocational Counselor and Trainer, my career started in 2004 when I was focusing on the development of soft skills. This brought me into human resources consulting, training organisation and facilitation, and project management.

After several years working in the corporate setting, in 2013 I discovered social entrepreneurship and experience design. Among other events, I co-founded a festival for innovation in education in Vienna (stEFFIE – Experimental Fun Festival for Innovative Education) and was part of the team in a Hackathon in Portugal.

In 2019 I started working in a game design agency, where not only was I responsible for people management, finance and organisation development but I was also creating and hosting events and developing game concepts.

In what felt like a parallel world, my first class as a dance teacher was in 2000. For ca. 20 years I taught social dances, mostly ballroom and salsa, and I’ve learned many more partner dances, like tango or kizomba. In 2017 I came across Biodanza, which was the first step in using dance as a way of expression and healing.

In the last years, I’ve added to my skills embodiment and dance practices such as Social Presencing Theater, embodiment coaching and Holistic Dance (including Attention through Movement, Contact Improvisation and Authentic Movement).