Alicia Fortinberry is an award-winning health writer, relationship expert, senior executive coach and psychotherapist.
Together with her husband and long-term collaborator Dr Bob Murray, she is founder of the highly effective Uplift Program, and author of the acclaimed books Raising an Optimistic Child (McGraw-Hill, 2006) and Creating Optimism (McGraw-Hill, 2004).
Alicia Fortinberry received an MS degree from the Columbia University School of Journalism and a BA from Sarah Lawrence College.
Alicia excels in helping individuals, business leaders and Fortune 500 corporations resolve conflict, reduce stress, and harness their innate optimism, resilience and effectiveness. Recent corporate clients include PricewaterhouseCoopers, Freehills, Ernst & Young, Promina, Oracle Corporation, and the Australian Office of State Revenue.
She is also a leading mind-body therapist and Feldenkrais (learning through movement) Practitioner and a pioneer in the development and teaching of techniques for using movement to enhance wellbeing. She has spoken extensively on her own healing from "treatment resistant" depression, which she attributes in large part to her loving marriage to Bob and a growing spiritual awareness.
In the media, Alicia has worked as Senior Editor for New Woman magazine, editorial advisor on a PBS medical series on stress, producer for the Physicians Radio Network, and contributor to The Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons Home Guide to Mental Health. As a Feldenkrais Practitioner, she had her own health series on local television. She has written extensively on health and psychology for major national magazines and newspapers including Psychology Today, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Harper's Bazaar, Ladies Home Journal, Mademoiselle, National Employment Weekly, New Woman, and Working Woman. Most recently, she has been a syndicated columnist on relationships and women's issues for a number of regional magazines, including Tampa Bay Woman.
Alicia has lived in Japan and Europe and studied yoga in India and Sri Lanka and Tai Chi in Hong Kong. She studied family therapy with Virginia Satir, (one of the originators in that field) and comparative culture and systems theory with Gregory Bateson (author of Steps Towards an Ecology of Mind).
She is a member of the Feldenkrais Guild, the Association for Humanistic Psychology, and the Association for Global New Thought, as well as the alumnae associations for the Columbia University School of Journalism, Sarah Lawrence College, the Brearley School, and the American School in London.