YOGAMOTIF is a creative wellness studio rooted in art, meditation, and embodied care. What began as an experiment in embodied art-making has grown into an evolving practice devoted to wholeness and rest in the body.
Our story
Founded in Pittsburgh’s East Liberty neighborhood by artist, researcher, and yoga guide Alecia Dawn Young, YOGAMOTIF was built on the belief that art making is a healing practice. In 2018, the studio opened its doors with its flagship Yoga Paint Party workshop, inviting guests to paint, move, and make during a full-bodied meditative practice.
As the teaching community grew, so did the studio’s offerings. YOGAMOTIF expanded to include weekly yoga classes, pop-up workshops, and community-centered experiences that supported Black communities of care, prenatal and postpartum bodies, meditation, and joy-based spaces. The work extended across the Greater Pittsburgh region through partnerships with community organizations and corporations, led by a collective of trauma-sensitive yoga guides.
Like many studios in the pandemic, in 2020, YOGAMOTIF transitioned from a physical location to a virtual studio. Throughout this evolution, the studio built a digital library of yoga and meditation practices with a strong emphasis on prenatal and postpartum care.
Today, YOGAMOTIF exists as a study and practice studio—a public classroom exploring how art, meditation, and everyday care support well-being.
Our teaching lineage extends from the guidance of Felicia Savage Friedman, founder of YogaRoots on Location. As we ground our practice in the earth, we acknowledge this takes place on stolen land and the unceded territories of Indigenous peoples. Knowing this, we lead with joy, love, and play, while remaining grounded in liberation. Always. In all ways.
Our Team
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Alecia Dawn Young
FOUNDER
Alecia Dawn Young is an artist and scholar who believes the creative process is an invitation to heal. The founder of the creative wellness studio YOGAMOTIF, she believes that generating art and life are connected and invests her time in people, projects, and communities that explore these practices. Her work is grounded in the collective healing of Black m/others and embodied making that supports mental health. Alecia’s career spans a commitment to community arts education and wellness, rooted in making, teaching, and researching in the visual arts.
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Dawnbee Kim-Fair
DIGITAL CONTENT MANAGER
Dawnbee Kim-Fair is a yoga instructor and entrepreneur, with a passion for creating content that aligns with her mission of healing and raising the collective consciousness. Dawnbee believes that yoga should be inclusive and accessible to all, regardless of body type, ability, race, gender, or financial status. While also working hard to honor, nor appropriate, this ancient practice. Yoga is a space that allows her to participate in social justice and activism, giving her the opportunity to share within the community.
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Carrie McCann
YOGA GUIDE
Carrie McCann is a yoga teacher, death doula, and plant witch who focuses on supporting people through life’s major transitions. She holds an exploratory and playful space for people to honor endings and difficult moments, acknowledge death, and be with what is there. She draws on her background in social work, breath and movement practices, and nature based approaches to offer practical, emotional, and spiritual support during the different seasons of our lives.
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Heather Manning
YOGA GUIDE
Heather has been practicing yoga for nearly a decade. Her passion for both personal and collective healing has brought her back to the mat over and over again. A graduate of YogaRootsonLocation anti-racist and trauma-informed yoga teacher training, it was through her yoga teacher studies that she was able to join her deep commitment to social change with yoga's spiritual foundations. In her own words Heather feels that her commitment to raja yoga, “allows me to navigate my life with more self-compassion and dignity which increases my capacity to hold that same space for others.” Her yoga classes offer students a chance to engage their practice with curiosity, playfulness, and gentle self-inquiry.
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Jacquelin Walker
YOGA GUIDE
Jacquelin Walker is a lawyer, artist, yoga instructor, and advocate for equity in arts, entertainment, and law practice. She creates spaces for voices excluded from these industries using her legal, creative, and yoga practices as labs to explore the possibilities that open to all of us when we center the care, concerns and visions of the folks marginalized within these communities.
Walker’s yoga practice and instruction focuses on sharing tools that help others create self-awareness with an eye toward individual and collective healing and expansion, centering principles of justice, joy, rest, and leisure.
Looking for a yoga teacher for your next event?
We are honoring our long-term partnerships and are not available for new yoga opportunities at this time. For one-time event programs, festivals, or drop-in classes, please contact our community of yoga teachers directly.