Dr. Catherine Shainberg grew up in England and France. She trained as an art historian at the School of the Louvre, earned a Masters from the Sorbonne and was a consultant for Unesco. In 1972, she moved to Israel where she converted to Judaism and spent ten years studying the Kabbalah of Light in Jerusalem with Madame Colette Aboulker-Muscat, a recognized Kabbalist. mystic and teacher. Catherine also studied with the Rav Zerbiv, head rabbi of Oran, Algeria, and the Rav Kook, son of the first Great Rabbi of Israel, the most revered Cabbalist of the 20th Century.

From 1972 to 1982 Catherine taught at the Hebrew University and the Music and Dance Academy in Jerusalem and founded the Center for Jewish Movement. She taught Bible text through movement and imagery, led workshops for Israeli army psychologists, treated wounded soldiers and cancer patients, and developed imagery techniques for mental patients. She also wrote The Big Egg, a play for Israeli and Arab children, which was performed throughout Israel.

In 1981 Catherine was invited to teach at the American Institute for Mental Imagery in New York City. She earned a Masters degree and Ph.D. in Psychology and co-founded with her late husband, David Shainberg M.D. and Prof. John Briggs, an exploration of dialogue that became the foundation for physicist David Bohm's famous "Dialogue Groups."

Catherine has appeared on television and performed at The Kitchen in NYC. She has chaired Women's Creativity at the Living Arts Foundation in Cape Cod. Her articles have been published in the Guggenheim Public, The Symposium on Love in Venice, ETV, the Spirit of Maat. She is author of Kabbalah and the Power of Dreaming: Awakening the Visionary Self and Genesis and Movement, a study of movement in Genesis and its application to human health and well being (not in print). Catherine lives with her son, Sam, in New York City.

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