Naomi Katz is a ritualist, educator, and artist whose work lives at the threshold between ancient ceremonial traditions and contemporary academic inquiry. She has a particular focus on situated, embodied, ecological knowledges and relational worldviews in response to an isolating culture of fragmentation. Her practice is rooted in a central question: how can ritual—understood as a relational, embodied, and ecological mode of knowing—be restored as a vital force in human culture?
Over the past decade, Naomi has guided hundreds of participants in retreats, workshops, and ceremonial spaces across Europe, the Americas, and the Middle East, emphasizing collective healing and cultural renewal. Her work unfolds within an ongoing apprenticeship of more than fifteen years with Carmen Vicente, Andean spiritual leader whose teachings have shaped a generation of Western practitioners engaged in the renewal of earth-based ritual traditions. In this lineage, Naomi has undergone extensive initiatory training, including multi-year vision quest cycles and the ceremonial transmission of altar practices that situate human life within the cycles of earth, ancestry, and cosmos.
Naomi's work is distinguished by its attention to translation—not only across languages (English, Spanish, and Hebrew), but across worlds, sharing ancient wisdom in a way that is accessible and digestible for Western audiences. As a long-time interpreter and practitioner of ceremonial oratory, she has cultivated a sensitivity to the resonance of the ritualized, poetic word and the ways meaning is carried through rhythm, metaphor, and presence. This inquiry extends into her parallel practice as a poet and her background as a dancer, as she explores the intimate relationship between language, prayer, and embodiment. Together, these threads form the foundation of her emerging body of work, Embodied Prayer, a practice that engages movement and spoken word, and invites individuals and communities to re-inhabit the sensory and relational dimensions of knowing.
A central focus of Naomi's research and teaching is the adaptation of traditional ceremonial designs within Western cultural contexts. As a founding graduate of the School of Secrets—an initiatory program developed by Carmen Vicente—she has participated in the careful transmission and documentation of embodied knowledge, with particular attention to women’s rites and the menstrual cycle as sites of both personal and cultural transformation. She is the author of Beautiful, a guide for young women and co-translator of The Rite of Menstruation by Natalia Contesse, a text that contributes to the contemporary re-emergence of menstrual ritual as a living practice.
Her work engages interdisciplinary conversations across the fields of divinity, anthropology, gender, dance, ecology, and psychedelic studies. In particular, she explores relational consciousness not as an isolated therapeutic intervention, but as a practice embedded within collective, interconnected frameworks—raising questions about belonging, grief, and the conditions necessary for healing in an increasingly fragmented world.
Alongside her scholarly and ceremonial work, Naomi serves as a teacher and mentor to emerging practitioners in Israel/Palestine, Central and Western Europe, and the United States. She develops and facilitates training pathways that integrate ritual design, leadership, and community process, in formats analogous to undergraduate and graduate-level study. Her contributions also extend into the arts, and she is a featured artist in El Destino de la Sangre (The Destiny of the Blood), an international exhibition of ritual textile work exploring menstrual symbolism and women’s embodied knowledge.
Born and raised in New York and trained within Western educational systems, Naomi's trajectory reflects a sustained crossing between epistemologies. Her work is animated by a commitment to cultivating language, pedagogy, and frameworks through which ritual and ceremony may be engaged not as peripheral or symbolic practices, but as rigorous, experiential forms of knowledge—capable of informing both academic discourse and the renewal of human community.
To read Naomi's abridged CV, click here.
Areas of teaching and inquiry:
-
Ritual and ceremony as relational and ecological epistemologies
-
Collective healing and the crisis of isolation
-
The re-emergence of shamanic and earth-based practices in Western cultures
-
Initiation, rite of passage, and human development
-
Menstrual ritual and the body as a site of knowledge
-
Language, poetry, and prayer as embodied forms of meaning-making
"It is clear to me that you are in the service of something greater than yourself, and that you possess a very big gift of expressing yourself both poetically and directly, with words and body."
-Rikke Libak
"You are a great inspiration to me. Your strength and honesty go directly to my heart. Thank you very very much!"
-Moran Nitzan
