About Mariana 

I have always been drawn to sound’s potential to reveal, engage and heal. I was born in rural Brazil, in a family connected to the earth who sang to their animals and lived on a countryside tree-spotted landscape. Music, singing and sounds have been part of my life since I was a child.

However, the awareness of being connected to the sound, myself as a sonorous being, took 30 years to manifest itself. It was during my PhD in Clinical Psychology at PUC-São Paulo that I finally affirmed the essential place of sound, singing and music in my life. My thesis, Sons de Banzo (Banzo Sounds), led me to deep encounters to the power of sound and opened a new path in my course: the studies about sound as a vibrant matter and its vivid-active effects on our lives.

Looking to combine scientific knowledge of the sound vibration in the body with spiritual and integral understanding, I found the work by Fabien Maman and Terres Unsoeld, with whom I have been studying at Tama-Do, the Academy of Sound, Color and Movement®.

With Tama-Do, a curiosity and passion for this vibrant matter–sound–as a therapeutic tool for the way of the soul has been the force that moves me since 2017. 

I deepened my studies of sound when I moved to Tiohtià:ke / Mooniyaang / Montreal for postdoctoral research at Concordia University in partnership with Universidade Federal Fluminense, in 2016. There, I worked with PPGCA, SenseLab, Acts of Listening Lab, and the performing arts cluster LePARC. As a postdoc, I expanded on my studies of sound as a therapeutic tool, and the voice as a musical and therapeutic instrument beyond the limits of language. Portions of my research were published in BANZO SOUNDS and BANZO LANDSCAPE, a 2019 English-Portuguese edition by Grosse Fugue Edition. 

I am currently furthering my studies in somatic psychotherapy through a 4-year training course at Biosynthesis Psychotherapy, with which my sound therapy work gains depth and enrichment.

Our work together is also informed by my 15 years as an artist, as well as an art educator with more than 10 years of experience with children between 3 and 10 years of age. I work in the intersection between art, research-creation and psychology. 

Through engagement with sound as vibration and voice-without-language—as performance, aesthetic proposition and clinical intervention—I seek to facilitate new modes of experience, and new techniques for living.