Meet the
Leadership Team
Kaila June Keliikuli
Creative Director
Kaila June Keliikuli (she/they) is the Creative Director of the School for Somatic Groundwork. With a background as a performing artist, personal trainer, somatic movement educator and curriculum designer, Kaila’s movement pedagogy has emerged through her interest in somatic patterning. Somatic patterning is a creative way to notice, identify and experiment with embodied impulses, tendencies and preferences through embodied learning and inquiry. In 1999 she began developing the movement system Somatic Groundwork (or they began developing her). Kaila designed Interdisciplinary Movement & Somatics, an ISMETA Approved Training Program, to bring high-quality, contemporary somatic movement education to other practitioners while building a community of Somatic Groundwork Teachers.
Kaila is a daughter, sister, mother, spouse and auntie whose ancestors arrived and settled Turtle Island, aka USA, beginning in the early 17th century. Her last name is Hawaiian and is gifted through her wife and best friend, Maile Keliikuli. Born and raised in the Rocky Mountains and now based in southwestern Idaho, the joy of being outside with trees, rocks and rivers has been with her since childhood. While growing up and through her early adulthood her mom, Fran, owned and directed a dance studio with a speciality in creative movement, ballet and jazz. With her mom’s training and desire to nurture every dancer’s creative voice, Kaila learned both technical and social skills to teach children, teens and adults. After high school, Kaila’s movement research expanded through the study of contemporary dance, improvisation and somatics. Eventually she found her way to rehabilitative science and performance enhancement through professional fitness training.
As a lifelong student and teacher of movement, Kaila has earned a BFA in Dance & Choreography and MS in Rehabilitative Science. She holds the ISMETA designation as a Registered Somatic Movement Educator plus multiple certifications from the National Academy of Sports Medicine and as a Fascial Fitness Trainer. She has designed and implemented curriculum for collegiate, vocational and studio programs for fitness professionals, yoga teachers and dance educators and has worked 1:1 with clients since 2009. Over the course of her career as a performing artist, Kaila traveled to Venezuela and Brazil with La Caravana Arcoiris por La Paz, performed in Montana with Headwaters Dance Company and Open Field Artists and in Colorado with Daughter Cells Dance. Kaila advocates for movement practice as a tonic medicine for structural hygiene and as a way to refresh our ways of relating.
Korrine Rothrock
Member Experience & Operations
Korrine Rothrock (she/her) is the Member Experience and Operations lead for the School for Somatic Groundwork. She is a writer, somatic movement guide, herbalist, and educator.
For more than a decade, she has guided plant-based and movement learning experiences throughout the Inland Northwest, exploring how sensory attention, story, and embodied experience can deepen our relationship with the places we call home.
Movement has shaped Korrine’s life from an early age. Her background includes dance, WildCore Movement instruction, herbalism, and somatic education. In a previous chapter of her life, she helped develop community gardening and local food programs in North Idaho. Those experiences built upon her appreciation for how people come to know a place through shared work, relationship, and time. She was drawn to Somatic Groundwork for its invitation to slow down, explore “ground as a partner,” and learn through direct experience. A graduate of the IMSomatics program, she is also a Somatic Groundwork Teacher, continuing to support others through this embodied approach to learning.
Through her work with the School for Somatic Groundwork and her business, Lapis Sky, she creates place-based learning experiences that weave together movement, medicinal plants, sensory exploration, and story.
Raised in the sagebrush country of the West and rooted in North Idaho for more than twenty-five years, Korrine remains curious about the possibilities that arise when people slow down long enough to encounter the living world of their home.