Ann Bortz
PsyD., E-RYT 500
Ann is a doctoral level, licensed clinical psychologist, with a specialty in trauma, who has been in professional practice for over 25 years. She consults with several residential and day treatment centers in Denver, serving children and adolescents with chronic histories of abuse and serious psychopathology. She also evaluates torture survivors from around the world, and mentors new clinicians performing such evaluations for Health Right International and Physicians for Human Rights. Dr. Bortz has testified in court numerous times as an expert witness in the area of trauma.
Ann’s Bio
Deeply interested in the interplay of psychology and yoga, Dr. Bortz was certified as a yoga teacher in 2004. In 2005, she pioneered a yoga therapy program for traumatized teens in residential care. Her ongoing work with these teens has been featured on 9News. Dr. Bortz has presented nationally on using yoga to address emotional reactivity and deficits in arousal modulation in a traumatized population. She has additionally served as guest faculty for teacher training programs in Denver and Boulder.
Dr. Bortz has also been actively involved in yoga research. With affiliations at the research arm of the Veteran’s Administration (the MIRECC) and at the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at the University of Colorado, she has developed and implemented a manualized yoga-based intervention in pilot studies and a large scale feasibility study in order to empirically study the viability of yoga as an adjunctive therapeutic intervention for veterans in distress.
Dr. Bortz is passionate about helping the yoga community better understand the complexity and risks of doing trauma work and how to deliver responsible yoga classes that help, not harm, their students.
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