After graduating law school at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Dr. Shafir (www.talshafir.com) followed her passion and studied dance-movement therapy in University of Haifa. Several years of work with children with neurological disorders led her back to school to complete her Masters and PhD in motor control in University of Michigan. These were followed by two postdoctoral fellowships: in brain-behavior interactions in infants at the Center for Human Growth and Development, and in neuroscience of emotions at the Department of Psychiatry, both at University of Michigan.
This background enabled her to develop her unique interdisciplinary research interest in movement-emotion interaction and its underlying brain mechanisms, behavioral expressions, and therapeutic applications.

This research is the topic of her TEDx talk: How your Body Affects your Happiness, and her 2016 study “Emotion Regulation through Movement: Unique Sets of Movement Characteristics are Associated with and Enhance Basic Emotions", which was chosen by ‘The Marker’ newspaper as one of the 26 most inspiring studies of that year.

During the past couple of years Dr. Shafir has been specializing in Laban/Bartenieff Movement Analysis and in the Anat Baniel Method: Neuromovement, which specializes at enhancing brain neuroplasticity through movement. She is currently a lecturer at the Academic College of Society & Arts, a research fellow at University of Haifa, and serves on The American Dance Therapy Association Research Committee.