Brighid O'Shaughnessy discovered Qoya in 2019 and immediately fell in love with the practice. It felt like a wonderful synergy of many things she values including movement, community building, personal reflection, mindfulness, and sacred ritual. She is thrilled to be offering monthly Qoya experiences in Chicago at ALTAR, a beautiful space for female identified folks to find solace, growth, and connection. In addition to Qoya, Brighid has been a Nia practitioner for nearly 20 years and teacher for over a decade, sparking health and wellbeing through movement to people of all ages and physical abilities. She teaches twice a week currently in Oak Park and has a stalwart group of students who attend her classes regularly. She loves providing healing spaces for people to return to and reclaim their bodies and find the connection between their physical and emotional lives.

In addition to her movement facilitation, Brighid has been working nationally in mental health for nearly 25 years. With a Masters in Social Work from the University of Chicago with a focus on Trauma and Neuroscience and a graduate certificate in Restorative Justice in Education from EMU, she offers coaching, consulting, training and advocacy to support both youth and adults.

Her focus is on building people's capacity to lean into and prioritize healthy relationships and repair harm when it happens. She has spent the last 6 years working in public schools throughout the Chicagoland area offering social work/therapeutic services as well as Restorative Justice coaching, consulting, and professional development for administrators, teachers, support staff, and youth. Brighid has a particular passion for supporting students who are neurodiverse, autistic, or who have experienced complex trauma and has found great joy in offering parents a safe and non-judgmental space to feel seen, heard, and prioritized.

Prior to her work in schools, she was the Founder and Longtime Executive Artistic Director of Erasing the Distance, a non-profit that uses documentary theatre to shed light on issues of mental health. Her productions at ETD reached over 55,000 people across the country and her novel approach to mental health awareness and stigma reduction led to teaching and collaborative opportunities at both University of Illinois at Chicago and The Chicago School of Professional Psychology.

She has garnered many grant awards for her work such as the 3Arts Vision Award, was named one of the U.S.'s top 200 Heroic Leaders making a difference in the country by Extra Mile America and has been featured on WBEZ, ABC News, the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun Times, The Reader, New City and more. She was granted funding from such prestigious groups as The Chicago Community Trust, The Driehaus Foundation, Rebecca's Dream, The Chicago Cultural Center, and the Illinois Arts Council to name just a few. She has also created documentary theater and storytelling experiences around women's health as well as the impacts of racism and segregation through her work with Tonika Lewis Johnson and the Folded Map project. She is currently spending all of 2025 working on documentary theatrical pieces exploring the impacts of adoption on families and has a publishing deal with Lived Places Press for her upcoming book, It's a Long Way Home, featuring the true stories of adoptive mothers. The goal of the book is to help prepare future social workers, medical professionals, educators and administrators, justice workers, and more on how to effectively provide care to those touched by adoption and to transform current systems, placing the needs of birth families and adoptees at the forefront.