Trained for 21 years in the classical South Indian dance form Bharatanatyam, her teacher was the primary pupil of T. Balasaraswati. She holds a BA from McGill University in Comparative Religion and a MA in Fine Arts from York University. She completed her yoga teacher training in 2010 at YogaSpace. She is a doctoral candidate in Dance Studies at York University working on a dissertation in the area of modern yoga. She is currently working on an entry on yoga for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism. In addition to writing for this blog, she has contributed an entry on yoga to The Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism and a chapter to Fields in Motion: Ethnography in the Fields of Dance (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2012) . She is also a songwriter/multi-instrumentalist with five solo releases (www.priyathomas.com) and an experimental project called iroquois falls.