creative backstory
photo: elizabeth brown eagle
“Teri Gandy-Richardson's
constructions are at once meditation and physical embodiment of the breath. A teacher and practitioner of yoga, her complexity of simplicity is grounding and revelatory.”
—Aisha Tandiwe Bell, artist + curator
Teri Gandy-Richardson identifies as an abstract painter. Yet, her process is to dissect, twist, tie, mold and adhere worn Levi’s denim scraps. Using acrylic paint to push the depth and dimension of her gestured, and sculptured surfaces Teri weaves history and cultural weight into her abstract compositions.
After 3-semesters studying Architecture at the Cooper Union, Teri Gandy-Richardson transferred to the Cooper Union School of Art where she earned her BFA in Painting. Many years later, while working as a graphic designer, she began to stretch the boundaries of her art practice by combining breath work with gestural drawing exercises for her Creative Arts Therapies thesis, (at The New School, NYC). This unexpectedly inspired a career in yoga, and subsequently running her own studio business. Today, as a professional yoga teacher (650-RYT), leading group and private sessions. Between surgeries during her personal experience with breast cancer in 2016, Gandy-Richardson became certified to teach oncology yoga to other survivors. Former client, Robin Roberts, featured Teri’s yoga4cancer class on Good Morning America in 2019. As the final owner of Park Slope Yoga Center, (Brooklyn) founded in 1999— Teri Gandy-Richardson continues to nurture Brooklyn’s yoga community in studios, privately and for survivors, treated at Maimonides Cancer Center, a monthly oncology yoga class.
As part of the current faculty at Playwrights Horizons Theater School, Tisch/NYU, Teri Gandy-Richardson teaches Yoga + Somatics, where she uses yogic systems and creative thinking as a practical and accessible foundation for guiding her students in practices for facing life’s challenges. Learning to support their own wellbeing and alignment, Teri has been proud to see students develop, discover and activate the strengths, and resources that they’ve had all along.
teri in denim Art CV, and current work+details..
