“Jamie McHugh is not adequately nor accurately described by words like dancer or movement therapist - he is much more for which there are no good words. Transformative artist may approach his ability to utilize the non-verbal (movement, vocalization, drawing) not only expressively but also conjointly with the psychological/ insightful to promote a healing integration of awareness."

George F. Solomon, M.D., Psychiatry and Biobehavioral
Sciences, UCLA

About Jamie

	More about Jamie: A personal journey to somatic expression Resume

Jamie McHugh, MA, RSMT is a Registered Somatic Movement Therapist (ISMETA), somatic coach, and fine art photographer living on the northern California coast.

Jamie has been teaching movement-based work for the past 30 years. From 1980 - 87, he was a National Endowment for the Arts Artist-in-Residence and a director of children’s dance theater in Wisconsin. He left the performance world to apprentice with dance pioneer Anna Halprin at Tamalpa Institute in California. At Tamalpa, he discovered movement as a transformative somatic art, and has been a faculty member there since 1988.

In the San Francisco Bay Area, Jamie has been on faculty in the Graduate School for Holistic Studies at John F. Kennedy University since 1991. He has also been locally affiliated with the Institute for Health and Healing and the San Francisco AIDS Foundation.

Jamie has taken his work overseas in numerous workshops. He was an annual presenter of "Movement as Medicine" workshops for the Swiss AIDS Federation from 1995 - 2007. He also directed a Healing Arts Training Group in Germany from 1997 - 2007.

Additionally, Jamie has been a guest teacher at diverse centers such as the Bristol Cancer Center, Esalen Institute, and Stanford University.

Jamie has studied Alexander Technique with Marjorie Barstow, Body-Mind Centering with Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, Continuum with Emilie Conrad, Insight Meditation with Steven Levine, Zero Balancing with Fritz Smith, and is an ongoing student of Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh of Plum Village.

Jamie has been published in various periodicals, such as Contact Quarterly, Yogi Times and the Monthly Aspectarian. See the Articles section of this site. Jamie's oral history "Alive at the Edge: A Life in Dance" was documented by the Legacy Project and is housed at the San Francisco Performing Arts Library.

Since 2007, Jamie has been exhibiting his fine art photography of the natural environment NatureBeingArt throughout California, and is currently completing work on his first book, "Restoring Original Grace: Movement as Medicine".

For more about Jamie McHugh, see Resume here, and the article A Personal Journey to Somatic Expression on the development of his work.

Jamie McHugh.
Photo by Rick Chapman.