About

Samantha is a certified doula who has trained with Carriage House Birth (New York, NY), Bini Birth (Los Angeles, CA), Upledger Institute (International), and Spinning Babies® (International). She has mentored with Keely Semler, MPH, and Samantha Huggins, co-founder of Carriage House Birth. She holds a certification in Craniosacral Therapy (CST) from the Upledger Institute and has trained in Abhyanga Ayurvedic lymphatic bodywork with Olivia Burr. She has also studied breast and chest care bodywork with Pamela Samuelson and participated in Pamela's Take Back the Speculum workshop, a hands-on training in which participants use speculums to view and learn their own cervixes. At the heart of Samantha's work is the belief that pregnancy care is more than biomedicine: that body, spirit, and emotion deserves equal tending, and that there is profound space where clinical care and tenderness, reverence and medicine, can be held together.

Samantha first learned about the role of a doula in 2017 while spending a summer at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, CA, where she studied meditation and compared the Bhagavad-Gita to Hamlet. Two summers later, that taste for weird comparisons took her to Florence, Italy, where she studied the moral and ethical currents of 13th-century Florence that shaped Dante's Inferno alongside the political outspokenness of the mid-2010s Black Lives Matter movement in New York City.

Upon return from Esalen, Samantha studied Comparative Religion and Sociology at NYU’s Gallatin School and graduated with a B.A. in Sociology. Her thesis, “Social Inequality: an Intersectional Approach” explored modern social issues at the intersection of gender, class, race, and religion from Renaissance proto-feminism and humanism to today’s BLM movement.

She is passionate about community building, hosting meditation classes that draw on Buddhist and Hindu practices to attempt to demystify Eastern traditions and bridge the Eastern-Western wellness binary. She also hosts a weekly book club for fellow Jews to discuss American literature as at the intersection of Jewish tradition, identity, race, gender, spirituality, food, and popular culture.

Samantha is most inspired by the lives and work of Ram Dass, Dorie Greenspan, Pamela Samuelson, Herbie Hancock, and RuPaul.