Meet Your Instructors

Meet Your Instructors

Get to know the instructors who make our studio feel like home. Each member of our team brings unique experience, care, and passion to their teaching so you can feel supported, challenged, and confident every time you step into class.

Pilates Instructor

Irina Valkov

Irina Valkov is a Pilates instructor with over 14 years of experience in mindful movement. With a background in gymnastics and martial arts, she brings a strong focus on alignment, strength, and control. Trained extensively in Reformer Pilates, Irina leads sessions that are both challenging and restorative, emphasizing precision, breath, and safe progression helping clients feel stronger, aligned, and energized after every session.

Pilates Instructor

Mia Taheri

Mia Taheri is a Comprehensive Pilates Instructor with a supportive, empowering approach. After years of surgeries and chronic hip pain, she discovered Pilates as a transformative practice that helped her rebuild strength and confidence. Mia emphasizes the mind–body connection and is especially passionate about supporting clients recovering from injury, creating a safe, welcoming space where everyone feels strong and empowered.

Soundbath Instructor

Dr. Elizabeth Blackstone (aka Pamela) has been immersed in the healing arts since 1996, blending yoga, meditation, sound healing, Reiki, and energy work into deeply transformative mind–body–spirit experiences. Known for her intuitive and energetic approach, she supports healing on both physical and energetic levels, creating spaces for profound relaxation and renewal. In addition to her wellness practice, she is a professional choral conductor and music instructor.

Stretch Instructor

Cristina Popescu

Cristina is a stretching therapist whose journey began as a national junior champion heptathlete and hurdler before a serious knee injury shifted her path. Through rehabilitation, she transformed her experience into a career in recovery, now working with post-surgical clients, chronic pain patients, and athletes. Her approach combines targeted stretching with dry sauna therapy to enhance circulation, improve mobility, and support safe, effective recovery.

Yoga Instructor

Tamara Gross

Yoga has been part of my life for over 17 years, through the busy seasons of motherhood. My path to teaching began while practicing yin yoga during recovery from low back issues. What started as a desire to deepen my own practice led to yin teacher training, and eventually a 200-hour power training, and a love for sharing yoga with others. I hope each class offers space to connect inward, find ease in the body, and experience the quiet joy of being.

Yoga Instructor

Raisa specializes in core conditioning and healthy alignment to help you move with ease, power and purpose in all stages of your fitness journey.

With 20 years of experience teaching yoga and group fitness classes, and a NASM-CPT foundation for strength and flexibility training, Raisa’s approach blends mindful movement with progressive strength training to build strength, confidence and joy in movement. Raisa specializes in core conditioning and healthy alignment to help you move with ease, power and purpose in all stages of your fitness journey.

Yoga Instructor

Lizbeth brings a clinically informed, integrative approach to healing, with dual master’s degrees in Yoga Therapy

Lizbeth brings a clinically informed, integrative approach to healing, with dual master’s degrees in Yoga Therapy and Yoga Studies and a focus on nervous system regulation and mind-body restoration. She teaches both private Yoga Therapy sessions and group classes ranging from Roll & Release to strong, intelligently sequenced flows that challenge and restore. Her work bridges science and embodied practice to help students build strength, relief, resilience, and sustainable wellbeing.

Pilates instructor

Kyla is a yoga and mat Pilates instructor with BravaFit

Kyla is a yoga and mat Pilates instructor who loves helping students build strength and body awareness through mindful movement. Her classes blend breath, flow, upbeat playlists, and Pilates-inspired core work to create a practice that is both grounding and energizing. She strives to create an inclusive space where students of all levels feel supported and empowered in their movement. In her free time, she enjoys spending time with her two cats, Sunny and Pedro.

Pilates instructor

Kiana Bartenstein is a passionate Pilates instructor at BravaFit

Kiana Bartenstein is a passionate Pilates instructor with a strong love for movement and overall fitness. With a background in both Pilates and weight training, she focuses on building strength, improving mobility, and creating balanced, sustainable movement practices.

Pilates instructor

McKinsey Shea is a Los Angeles based Pilates instructor with BravaFit

McKinsey Shea is a Los Angeles based Pilates instructor and professional commercial dancer. Her teaching style combines classical and contemporary Pilates for a full body activation. Her background in dance seeps into her Pilates classes, offering a hint of ballet in the exercises. McKinsey’s goal is that you leave the class feeling taller, stronger, and more aligned in your mind body connection— all while having fun in the process!