About

Rachelle Palnick Tsachor is Associate Professor of Theatre Movement at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). She is a teacher of the Alexander Technique (ATI, AmSAT), and is also certified in Laban/Bartenieff Movement Analysis (CMA), Somatic Movement Therapy (M-SMT, ISMETA) and a supervisor for the Center for Mind-Body Medicine (CMBM.org) global trauma relief programs. Her research investigates body movement to bring a human, experiential understanding to how movement affects our lives. Tsachor analyzes patterns in moving bodies in diverse projects, researching movement’s effects on our emotions, health, learning.

Tsachor is a co-investigator in Project STAGE, Science Theatre Advancing Generative Engagement, a collaboration between researchers at UIC and Chicago Public Schools (CPS) funded by the National Science Foundation of the United States. STAGE developed an interdisciplinary approach employing embodied enactments (movement, sound, drama, and dance) to support students, especially those from historically marginalized communities, in learning science while increasing joy and personal connection to science practice. She is also co-author of a series of studies about how movement affects people: Emotion Regulation Through Movement and How Do We Recognize Emotion From Movement (Frontiers in Psychology), and A Somatic Movement Approach to Fostering Emotional Resiliency (Frontiers in Neuroscience), and the chapter on movement in Integrative Rehabilitation Practice: The Foundations of Whole-Person Care for Health Professionals. Their research was recently the basis of “The Joy Workout—Exercises for Happiness” featured in the New York Times, and is also the basis of studies affective computing and intelligent interaction applying movement to such fields as robotics and machine learning.