My name is Vora, and I am a student of the creek, the Angeles National Forest, and the living world. Born and raised in Los Angeles, my artistic practice is rooted in honoring the plants, animals, people, and ecosystems that have raised me. I work as an arts educator, dancer, and musician, using performance as a way to explore embodiment, emotional release, and humanity’s relationship with the earth.I am particularly interested in helping people reconnect to their bodies and to the earth, using performance as a space where release, vulnerability, and remembrance are possible.
Alongside my artistic practice, I also organize arts programming for Water & Power, an artist-led collective and gallery space in South Los Angeles. This organizing work extends my movement and sound practice into community-based settings. In 2025, I was awarded the Young Climate Leadership Fellowship to implement a program I designed acEarth Songs. Earth Songs is a series of community-centered workshops uplifting BIPOC queer and trans educators working in land justice, herbalism, somatic education, and music. Through artist-led offerings, the series empowers community artists and practitioners to share ancestral knowledge and land-based practices that have been historically marginalized or erased, creating pathways for personal and collective healing.
Much of my previous teaching and facilitation has been with unhoused youth with complex PTSD and abuse trauma. I’m excited to collaborate with the Angeles Chapter on their upcoming event Earth Moves, which seeks to use movement-based practices to reconnect people with the earth and inspire climate action through: embodiment, storytelling, and community. I’m really excited to present a workshop I’ve been teaching for the past year, Embodying Emotion. Embodying Emotion is a somatic, movement -based workshop that explores the question: How can we allow emotions to move through our bodies in relationship to ourselves, others, and the living world? Grounded in somatic and trauma-informed frameworks, the foundation for this workshop is based on data that shows trauma is created when emotions have been repressed, suppressed or stopped from reaching their full expression. Without release, these emotions are then stored in the body as trauma and eventually become chronic illness.
In this workshop, we will learn how to attune to the environment and use simple somatic techniques to explore ways emotions move through us, even in the presence of resistance, shame or guilt. We will focus on how to recognize in the body when emotional sensation is present, name it, tune into it and allow it to reach expression in a healthy way.
Nature and environmental awareness are woven throughout the workshop as resources for regulation and grounding. Participants will be invited to draw support from their breath, felt sensations , and contact with the earth as they move their body. Practices emphasize choice, consent, and self-pacing, and all movements can be adapted to seated, standing, or still participation.I am looking forward to the collaboration process and excited to work more deeply with the Angeles Chapter!
