National Conference, Mind-Body Medicine, Wardha, India, 2012

Yogacharini Sangeeta Laura Biagi, is a educator in the fields of art, music, foreign languages/intercultural communication, and yoga. 

Originally from Siena, Italy, she earned a B.A. (with honors) from the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at the University of Siena. In 1997 she moved to New York where she earned a Master of Arts and a Ph.D. from the Department of Performance Studies at New York University. Her dissertation (Professor Richard Schechner, advisor) was on the relationship between musi, dance and healing in the Southern Italian ritual of tarantismo.

She served as a Visiting Professor in Italian Folklore and Music at New York University and Vassar College (NY) where she was a recipient of the Andrew W. Mellon Award to promote dialogue among faculty in the fields of arts and science. She was also the recipient of the Carolyn Fae Grant grant in 2010, 2011 and 2012 to bring contemplative and yogic-based practices into academia. In the fall of 2012, through the support of this grant, she lectured on sound studies and the embodied imagination in the departments of Music, Drama, Dance, Religion, English, Italian and Psychology at Vassar College.

Between 2009 and 2011, Sangeeta Laura Biagi lived and researched at the International Center for Yoga Education and Research (Ananda Ashram, India), earning a Eighteen-Months Residential Senior Yoga Teachers Diploma in Rishiculture Ashtanga Yoga, in the Paramparya of Yogamaharishi Dr. Swami Gitananda Giri.

In the United States, she has performed, taught and presented lectures on music, yoga and wellbeing at New York University, Vassar College, La MaMA theatre, Judson Church, Gallery at Deep Listening Space; in India at ICYER, Yoganjali Naytalayam, at the Morarji Desai National Institute of Yoga in New Delhi, and at the J. Nehru Medical College in Wardha; in Italy at the Associazione Culturale Artè, Centro di Ashtanga e Rishi Yoga in Milan, Italy; and in Germany at the Gitananda Yoga Association in Berlin, Germany.

In 2008 Sangeeta earned an official tour guide permit for the city of Florence, Tuscany. She has, since, offered tailored tours to invididuals and groups. He main field of interest is esoteric symbolism in Renaissance art and architecture. Sangeeta also works as a cultural and linguistic interpreter for seminars, conferences, and intercultural events.

She has received the Helene Wurlitzer Residency Grant for Composers in Taos, New Mexico, where she will be an artist in residence in the fall of 2013 to work on her book and album on listening as a tool for conscious evolution.