Gigi Otálvaro, PhD

Public Classes Taught

Laughter Yoga

Experience

Gigi Otálvaro, PhD, is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and educator. She began practicing laughter yoga in 2019 at the UCSF Osher Center, and shortly thereafter obtained her Laughter Yoga Leader Certification, to begin offering classes at Stanford University. Since then, over 800 students, faculty, and staff have taken her classes or introductory workshops. She currently serves as Associate Director of Stanford Living Education where she leads the LifeWorks Program for Integrative Learning. This program offers courses and workshops that integrate scholarship, creative expression and embodied practices such as mindfulness and self-reflection to help students connect their academic work with their core values and goals. She is also a Certified Yoqi Qigong Flow Instructor and designs and teaches classes that combine laughter yoga, qigong, and other movement-meditation practices with theater and performance exercises. In award-winning publications and feminist scholarship, her research and pedagogy engage Latina/x and women of color feminisms, queer of color critique, mindfulness-based art practice, as well as art and activism. 

Education and Training

• PhD, Theater and Performance Studies, Stanford University
• MA, Visual and Critical Studies, California College of the Arts
• BA, Hybridity and Performance, Brown University
• Certified Laughter Yoga Leader, Laughter Yoga University
• Certified Qigong Flow Instructor, Yoqi® 

Personal Statement and Approach

As a wellbeing educator, I design and teach courses at the generative nexus of creativity and contemplation. My mission is to help people discover their unique gifts and to reconnect to their bodies at a time when humanity is highly disembodied. I invite them to think critically and compassionately, as well as to cultivate joy and embodied wisdom through performing arts and healing modalities such as theater for social change, laughter yoga, qigong, and other contemplative practices focused on play.  

It is especially meaningful for me to teach laughter yoga at the Osher Center, which is where I first learned about the practice, when I was a caregiver for my family who was receiving treatment at the UCSF Helen Diller Cancer Center.