Breakout Session

Issues of Intimacy in the One-on-One Teaching Environment

Saturday, June 27 

Presenter: Tonia Sina

How do we protect all parties in the one on one teaching environment when our art form requires accessing vulnerable feelings and emotions? What about touch? Join Tonia as she introduces you to new NATS protocols developed to ensure healthy boundaries are maintained in the studio while creating settings where the best work can be done by teachers, coaches, conductors, and singers in these settings.

 About Tonia Sina

Tonia Sina is the Founder of Intimacy Directors International (along with co-founders, Alicia Rodis and Siobhan Richardson). She was the first ever Intimacy Choreographer and invented the term in her master’s thesis at VCU. Along with teaching workshops internationally traveling with a dialysis machine and service dog, Daphne Rose, she has choreographed intimacy at the Lyric Opera, Stratford Festival, The Marriott Theatre, and is slated to be the Intimacy Choreographer at Steppenwolf this winter. Directing credits include: The Woman in Black, In the Next Room (or the vibrator play), Angelina Project (in collaboration with playwright, Frank Canino), Spring Awakening, along with three self-devised original plays. Recently featured in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, American Theatre Magazine, CBC Radio, Huffington Post, and hundreds of other publications and podcasts, Tonia has been researching Intimacy for the Stage and Sexual Harassment in the industry since she began research for her thesis in 2004.

Also a director, playwright, model, and performer, Tonia is a soon-to-be triple kidney transplant recipient and rare and chronic disease patient advocate and national motivational speaker. She attended Niagara University for her BFA in theatre performance, and Virginia Commonwealth University where she studied movement and earned her MFA in Movement Pedagogy with a specialty in Intimacy for the Stage.