Flora is a dancer, Laughter Yoga leader and Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapist who has been on a deep embodied dive into ways of inducing natural highs and regulating the nervous system since 2016. She runs a therapy practice, FLORA CRANIOSACRAL, based in East Sussex & East London; teaches regularly at STUDIO SOMA; and collaborates on the eco-choreographic research project ‘Rewilding Play led by Kate Sagovsky’.

Flora has 15 years experience working as a dancer, performer and educator, and has developed passions for devised work, site-specific work, and performance improvisation. She studied dance and performance at London Contemporary Dance School. A multidisciplinary exchange experience at California Institute for the Arts in 2008 stoked her appetite for experimentation and cross artform collaboration.

Flora regularly performs improvised solos and finds improvising a great way of doing something with her sense of self. She resonates strongly with choreographer Robert Wood’s vision of being/seeing ‘a person dancing, not someone in the role of “dancer” – a person with all their spiritual, dispositional and dynamic presence’.

Her latest projects include: collaborating with improvisation coach Andrew Morrish to develop and document her performance improvisation practice, iteratively: The Mirror of Laughter, Clutching at Straws, Dancing in the Bardo (2022-present); multi-role acting in Lost Text Found Space's site-specific production of Noël Coward's Still Lives, directed by Rebecca McCutcheon (2024); and co-authoring the novella and film Nora the Many with Nora & Eleanor Bauer (2022, Sadler's Wells). 

As a therapist and facilitator, Flora loves supporting people, not least performers, into more hopeful, sensuous, wonder-filled and confident relationships with their bodies and themselves. Sensitive to the complexities of body-mind healing in a troubled world, she is devoted to leading herself and others along the path towards a life fully felt, fully expressed. Flora draws on Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy, Laughter Yoga, somatic improvisation and clowning to help people get in touch with their own presence and playfulness - to feel, heal, and flourish (in that order).

Flora co-directs ‘Nora’ with dancers Eleanor Sikorski & Stephanie McMann. Nora is a ‘mountain'; they invite choreographers to come and take a ‘hike'. As a trio they've created new pieces with celebrated dancemakers Liz Aggiss, Simon Tanguy, Jonathan Burrows & Matteo Fargion, Deborah Hay, and Eleanor Bauer, touring nationally and internationally.

As a freelance performer Flora has collaborated with artists Seke Chimutengwende, Guy Dartnell, Jamila Johnson-Small, Florence Peake and Grace Schwindt.

Having lived for many years in London, she now lives near Lewes, East Sussex, with her husband.

Learn more about Flora’s practice: www.florawellesleywesley.com | floracraniosacral.com