About Dr Bruna Lopes

I hold a PhD in Education and have spent over 15 years teaching, researching, and learning alongside people from all walks of life. But somewhere along the way I came to understand something that no academic training fully prepares you for: we are living through an epidemic of disconnection — from our bodies, from each other, from our own knowing.

That understanding shapes everything I do. 

Like many researchers, I arrived in academia carrying everything I had — my history, my language, my way of seeing the world — and quickly learned that most of it would have to wait outside the door. 

Academic writing, I was told in ways both explicit and silent, had a particular shape. 

Correct. Precise. Impersonal. And for a long time I believed that my inability to produce that shape was a failure of intelligence rather than a failure of fit. Then I found Bell hooks. Then Gloria Anzaldúa. And something shifted. Here were scholars who wrote from the body. Who named their pain, wrote from their own experiences. Who refused to separate the personal from the intellectual — and produced, in that refusal, some of the most rigorous and transformative work I had ever encountered. 

But there was something else I had not yet found. Something below the voice.

After finishing my PhD, I turned to movement — and discovered how entirely I had been living in my head. Years of academic training had made me extraordinarily good at thinking. It has also made me a stranger to my own body. Movement did not immediately fix that. But it cracked something open. It showed me where I had been absent from myself.

In 2025, I travelled to Bali for a teachers' training. Every day began with movement and mindfulness. And something I had long suspected became undeniable: our nervous systems are not regulated. We are moving through our lives — through our classrooms, through our research, through our writing — in a state of chronic disconnection. And that disconnection costs us. It costs us presence. It costs us creativity. It costs us the slow, digesting, meaning-making process that real writing requires.

Around the same time, I completed a creative writing course I had dreamed of for years. For the first time in my academic life, I was invited to tell my stories. To name what had hurt. To write not for evaluation but for truth. I wrote things I am still proud of. I still return to them.

Writing the body was born from all of this — from my academic experience,  the movement practice and the Bali mornings and the creative writing workshop that finally made space for me. 

It is not a wellness program. It is not a writing hack. It is an invitation to bring all of yourself to the page — and to discover that when you do, the writing that emerges is not only more authentic. It is more powerful.

I hold a PhD in Education and a Master of TESOL, and a Postgraduate in Creative Writing. I am a researcher, a lecturer, and a writer. I am also a Brazilian-Australian woman who has spent her life moving between languages, cultures, and ways of knowing.

All of that is in the method.