Elana Katz is a conceptual artist and dedicated yoga practitioner.  She was first introduced to yoga at the age of 11, while training as a classical dancer. She had a knee injury and only a yoga practice was able to repair her condition. Since this time, Elana has had a deeply rooted respect for the tradition of yoga. She has since trained in many different styles, including classical hatha, Iyengar, Ashtanga-based vinyasa, and Kripalu Yoga (completing a 200 hour teacher training in Kripalu Yoga in 2009). She still continues to work with her first teacher and long time inspiration, Robert Boustany, who has now founded a method known as Pralaya Hatha Yoga.

Elana left dance as a teenager, and has since worked in various mediums of art. In 2008, performance art became Elana’s primary medium of artistic expression, yet she continues to work also in the mediums of photography, video, and installation. She attended the Parsons School of Design in New York and completed graduate studies at the University of Arts Berlin (UdK Berlin).  Her recent grants have included the DAAD Graduate Studies Grant and the Franklin Furnace Grant for Performance Art. Over the past years, Elana has exhibited/ performed in Germany, Serbia, Italy, Belgium, the United States, and Japan.

Since relocating to Berlin in 2008, Elana has taught yoga at Home Yoga (since 2009) as well as Galerie Petra Vankova, where she and artist Philip Metz founded YOGA for ARTISTS, a program that promotes the notion that wellness energizes the creative mind and body, and can inform and inspire artists to create. The program is a natural extension of Elana’s own experience of living as a yogi and artist. In 2011 Elana was invited as a guest teacher at YogaJaya in Tokyo, Japan, where she taught yoga as well as lead workshops in creative improvisation and open eye meditation -- exploring the use of yogic principals in diverse fields of expression and creativity. Elana has also worked specifically with musicians to teach yoga techniques related to playing an instrument, and has taught yoga and meditation at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, USA.

It is Elana’s mission to move forward learning, living, and teaching the beauty that lies in awareness, reflection, inquiry, and expression—the basis for yoga, as well as all fields of art.

Elana also offers customized private yoga lessons at an affordable sliding-scale rate. For more info please contact katzyoga@gmail.com.

Website: www.elana-katz.com