From Vermont to Minnesota, from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to the United Kingdom, her dance and research journeys have been interwoven for more than a decade.
Brennan graduated summa cum laude with an undergraduate degree in Neuroscience from Middlebury College in Vermont. Her senior work in Brazil investigated whether a single session of capoeira significantly impacted participants’ state anxiety, self-efficacy, and prosocial behavior tendencies from before to after a session as compared to other movement and non-movement control activities. Brennan subsequently worked as a lab manager and research assistant at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at Virginia Tech Carilion in labs that combined methods from clinical and experimental psychology, neuroscience, biomedical engineering, and behavioral economics to investigate decision-making in healthy and clinical populations, including in participants with mood, anxiety, and substance disorders, as well as at-risk youth.
In 2019, Brennan conducted Fulbright research in Niterói and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in collaboration with professors and capoeira practitioners at the Universidade Federal Fluminense and the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. Expanding on her undergraduate senior work, she sought to investigate an intervention that could be used to supplement clinical and counseling approaches to mental health cross-culturally. Her Fulbright research examined not just changes to participants’ mental states over one session of capoeira, but how completing sessions of capoeira several times a week for a semester could correlate with changes to interpersonal and individual mental health factors, especially empathy.
Brennan completed her MSc with distinction in Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford. Her thesis investigated the role of socio-affective and cognitive support strategies as an initial step to decreasing the cumulative emotional burden of prolonged support provision for those who provide support professionally, such as mental healthcare providers and peer supporters.
At present, Brennan holds prestigious fellowships from the University of Oxford, including the Rachel Conrad Fellowship for Depression Efficacy Research, a Clarendon Fund Fellowship, and a Medical Sciences Division Studentship. After consolidating the existing literature on social dance for depression and creating a novel classification system for social dance and movement activities, her current lines of research examine how eight weeks of social dance (in the form of salsa dancing, versus a waitlist control) impact symptoms of depression, social learning, and social and emotional processing; how a novel social exchange task could be used to characterize social learning and generosity sensitivity in young people with and without depression; and whether offering social dance classes to individuals seeking mental health support through the NHS public healthcare system could increase the efficacy of improvement in conjunction with other forms of treatment.
With respect to her own social dance journey, Brennan has been teaching, choreographing, and performing partner dance for over thirteen years. She began in ballroom dance in Minnesota at age eleven, transitioned into swing dance (East Coast and Lindy Hop) during her years in Vermont, and then moved more into Latin dance styles in Virginia in 2016, where she traveled and performed on salsa and bachata teams. She has taught various styles of partner dance and enjoys teaching at the intersection of them; one of her most well-received workshop series was called Buffet Style Partner Dance (an eight-week series with one week of ballroom dance, one week of Latin dance, one week of swing dance, and one week of style and musicality). As an instructor, Brennan emphasizes connection technique, play, musicality, and improvisation—skills that transcend individual partner dance forms. She is a certified instructor in Juan Calderón’s Dance Whispering community and has also taught and practiced capoeira in Vermont, Minnesota, and Brazil.
Brennan is passionate about harnessing social dance and movement for cost-effective, accessible, non-invasive, and scalable approaches to mental health treatment for individuals with low mood, loneliness, and depression. Her interdisciplinary research and practice aim to unlock the potential of social dance and movement as impactful mental healthcare tools on a global scale.
