Contact: amandablairmacdonald.com, abmacd53@gmail.com, 312-823-2224

Amanda Blair MacDonald teaches private lessons and small group classes in Lincoln Park, Winnetka, and online. Amanda's students include office workers, exercisers, seniors, teachers, public speakers, yogis, actors, dancers, musicians, and massage therapists.

If the Alexander Technique works on the underpinnings of all movement, then it can help you do whatever it is that you do, better.  Amanda can design a group class, workshop or presentation to meet your needs.  Workshops include, but are not limited to: Banishing Zoom Fatigue, Inner-Ergonomics, The Science of Stress, Managing Anxiety, Improving Public Speaking, Wellness Through Movement, and Movement for Performing Artists. She particularly enjoys helping students with PT and OT exercises during recovery from injuries and surgeries.

Amanda has expertise in Brain-Compatible pedagogy and offers professional development for teachers and parent education for incorporating movement into the home and classroom environments to improve sensory regulation, coordination, and executive functioning skills. 

About Amanda:

Amanda grew up loving music and dance. She was surrounded by music from a very young age, but did not begin to learn dance technique until college. Because of this late start, she questioned everything. “How do my muscles work? How do I get my body to do what others have been doing since they were young?” These questions grew into a lifelong exploration of movement and wellness. Amanda studied yoga, Pilates, floor barre, and various styles of dance, and finally found The Alexander Technique. One of her early teachers helped her understand that The Alexander Technique teaches awareness about the underpinnings of all movement, and therefore allows for a deepening in all other practices. As Amanda’s skills improved, her desire to share what she knew through teaching blossomed, and she joined an Alexander teacher training course.

Alexander training includes:

Service to the Alexander community:

  • Planning Committee for AmSAT’s 2013 Annual Conference and General Meeting in Chicago

  • Co-founder and Treasurer of Chicago Alexander Teachers: Sept 2013 - present

  • AmSAT Training Standards and Course Review Committee: Feb 2014 - July 2018

  • AmSAT Membership Chair:  June 2019 - present

  • Curator and Host of “Taking Time to Connect” Membership Zoom series: March 2020 - present

  • AmSAT Board of Directors: June 2022 - present

Amanda’s Alexander Technique journey has always paralleled her journey as a performer and dance teacher. She incorporated her Alexander work into the movement for actors classes she taught at The American Academy of Dramatic Arts in NYC, where over the course of six years she developed curriculum that helped her students bridge demands in acting, voice and dance. During those years she also worked under the supervision of Harry Woolever at The American Musical and Dramatic Academy in NYC, learning to teach his foundations of theatre dance curriculum and Hanya Holm’s floor series. She studied at the Dance Education Laboratory and the Kane School for Core Integration, also in NYC.

Upon moving to Chicago, Amanda began to work more and more with children. In her search to create meaningful and developmentally appropriate curriculum for them, she attended the Summer Dance Institute for Teachers at the Creative Dance Center in Seattle, WA, founded by Anne Green Gilbert. There she learned the Laban taxonomy for movement, BrainDance, and Brain-Compatible lesson planning. The scientific underpinnings of this work showed a link between her work with Alexander Technique, the Holm floor series, and her work with children. In January 2019 she became a Registered Movement Pattern Analyst, a branch of Laban studies.

Amanda currently teaches in the School of Music at DePaul University and guest teaches at The Theatre School at DePaul, Roosevelt University, Northwestern University, and the University of Illinois, Chicago.