Katy Jane first discovered yoga and meditation after a near-death experience in high school which led her to live with a Brahmin family in Nepal where she was first exposed to Vedic Sanskrit. She then went on to study South Indian Carnatic music at Amherst College and classical yoga with many masters in India and the USA. She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in Religious Studies (Vedic Sanskrit & classical yoga) from the University of California (Santa Barbara). An American Institute of Indian Studies scholar for Hindi and Bengali, she was awarded a Ford Foundation Fellowship for her master’s degree research in West Bengal and Bangladesh on the indigenous and Sanskritic cults of the goddess Kālī. During her two-year tenure in Calcutta, she was sponsored by the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture for Vedic Sanskrit studies and Vedānta. There she immersed herself in traditional adhyāyanam with her Vedic Sanskrit paṇḍita and a rigorous daily Vedic study. For her doctoral research on “enlightenment” within Vedic, classical yoga and Śrī Vidyā traditions (and embodied in place), she was awarded a Fulbright-Hayes Fellowship. During her research year, she completed a full circumambulation of the Narmada River, interviewing her dissertation subjects along the way—countless pilgrims, bābās, sādhus and sādhvīs and yogins. In writing her dissertation, she discovered a more popular and less strictly academic voice. As a result, after serving as an assistant professor of world religions and Sanskrit at California Polytechnical University, Simpson College, the University of Colorado (Boulder) and Naropa University, she left academia to apply her knowledge of the Vedas, classical Yoga, Sanskrit and Śrī Vidyā to the yoga community. She teaches her signature course, Sanskrit for Yogis, (and in-depth courses on Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtras, the Bhagavad Gītā, the principle Upaniṣads, Vedic chanting, among others) in many 200hr and 500hr yoga teacher training curriculums worldwide. She’s the author of Awakening with Sanskrit, Feeling the Shakti of Sanskrit, and Sanskrit for Yogis: An Introduction to Nāda, the Yoga of Sacred Sound. Presently, she serves as the director of yoga studies at the Dunagiri Retreat in Uttarakhand, India where she resides with her fiancé, teaches online Sanskrit classes and maintains a busy jyotisha (Vedic Astrology) consultancy. (You can learn more about Dr. Katy Jane at: www.drkatyjane.com)