Gigi Otálvaro, PhD

Public Classes Taught

Laughter Yoga

Experience

Gigi Otálvaro, PhD, is an interdisciplinary artist, author, and educator. She began practicing laughter yoga in 2019 at the UCSF Osher Center for Integrative Health and soon after earned her Laughter Yoga Leader Certification, which inspired her to launch classes at Stanford University (where she completed her PhD). In the seven years after completing her doctorate, nearly 1,000 students, faculty, alumni, and staff participated in her laughter yoga classes and workshops. In her most recent role as Associate Director of Stanford Living Education, she directed the LifeWorks Program for Integrative Learning, an interdisciplinary program combining scholarship, creative expression, mindfulness, and embodied practices. During her time at Stanford, she designed and taught courses across multiple departments, including Theater and Performance Studies, Art History, Psychiatry, the Program in Writing and Rhetoric, Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and others. She also launched the Art & Well-Being Engagement (AWE) initiative, working with campus partners and museums to foster connection, belonging, and community health through creative expression.

In addition to her laughter yoga work, she is a Certified Yoqi® Qigong Flow instructor, creating classes that integrate movement, meditation, theater, improvisation, and laughter for holistic mind-body well-being. In her 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.