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Susanna Harwood Rubin Photographs Welcome.

Susanna is the author of Yoga 365: Daily Wisdom for Life On and Off the Mat. She is a yoga teacher, writer and artist, whose work is rooted in South Indian Philosophy. Her spiritual home is in the great Nataraja and Tillai Kali Temples of Chidambaram, Tamil Nadu, India, where she has travelled for darshan annually since 2008 .

 

Susanna created Devi Soul Yoga, an approach to teaching that includes Yogic myth, mantra, mudra, and meditation in each of her classes. She combines these practices with a careful attention to alignment and an emphasis on the breath to guide flowing movement sequences. Her classes are challenging with a powerful spiritual component, inviting students into the deep sweetness of svadhyaya, or self-study. Based in NYC, Susanna leads workshops and retreats internationally, mentors, trains teachers, and speaks on yoga philosophy, meditation, myth, and writing. Teaching since 2002, she is E-RYT-500 and YACEP.

 

Off the mat, Susanna spends her time writing and drawing. Her book, Yoga 365: Daily Wisdom for Life On and Off the Mat, has sold over 30,000 copies and is currently being translated into Korean. Susanna writes for numerous publications and created the popular Writing Your Practice and 30Things workshops and online courses, which apply yoga philosophy and myth to the practice of writing, unlocking yogis’ creativity and refining their self-expression. Students from over 25 countries have participated since 2011. Previously Susanna worked at NYC’s Museum of Modern Art where she lectured and wrote, including co-writing the book Looking at Matisse and Picasso(2003).

 

Susanna has presented at venues such as The Rubin Museum of Art (no relation!), The Financial Gym, and S.H.E. Summit, and loves to work with both school and corporate groups, believing that everyone can benefit from Yoga and Meditation. Susanna has been profiled on the HuffPost Live, MSNBC Today, Yoga Journal, SoulCrush Podcast, Embodied Philosophy’s Chitheads, The Shakti Hour, and more.

 

Susanna is deeply grateful to Dr. Douglas Brooks, Leslie Kaminoff, and Sianna Sherman for continually inspiring, supporting, and challenging her.

Susanna first remembers loving to write in grade school, spending hours writing and illustrating books of her own poetry. This expanded into a life-long passion for literature and writing through a rigorous academic education, in which she read everything from Shakespeare to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Toni Morrison to Balzac, finally falling madly in love with Marcel Proust while studying in Paris.

She has never looked back.

Photo RoxxeNYCSusanna spent years in the NYC art world as an artist and a writer and lecturer for MoMA, including co-writing the book Looking at Matisse and Picasso. She created MoMA’s first art and writing classes, collaborating closely with Harvard University’s Project Zero, the university’s educational research group, to develop and implement curriculum in NYC schools and at the museum. She continues to contribute to art publications and websites, and draws on a daily basis. Her drawings are in numerous public and private collections.

 

Susanna’s book, Yoga 365: Daily Wisdom for Life On and Off the Mat, has sold over 30,000 copies and is currently being translated into Korean and Vietnamese. She currently writes on yoga, writing, art, and life for a number of publications, including The Huffington Post, Mantra Wellness, Yoga Journal, NY Yoga+Life, and more. She created the popular Writing Your Practice and 30Things workshops and online courses, which apply yoga philosophy and Hindu Myth to the practice of writing. She loves to assist yogis and writers in finding and refining their voices, and continues to talk about Proust to anyone who will listen.

My work explores the idea of body and mind as landscape: an internal and external topography in which objects, thoughts, and memory shift and rearrange. I am interested in softening these boundaries until they become permeable, creating a fluid conversation between my self, and my environment. The accumulations of body parts, landscape elements, words, and art historical references are a mirroring back of my own thought processes: how I prioritize and categorize to shape my world. What I see around me correlates to what I find within. My work transforms my daily sensory experience into personal meaning.

 

My drawings overtly reference Indian miniatures, Japanese prints, and also iconic western nudes from Manet, Goya, and Ingres. My life as a yogi has been the greatest influence on my work, merging the physical and metaphysical in my life and, naturally, in the studio. The repetitive processes which have always been a part of my art making have become a form of meditation so that the acts of drawing, sewing and gluing are now ways of practicing.

 

My work is in numerous public and private collections, including the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Berkeley Museum of Art, and the UCLA Hammer Museum. I have exhibited internationally, participated in Artist Residencies, and have had articles written on my work in publications ranging from Flash Art to the New York Times, Sculpture Magazine, Paris Télérama, and more.

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