“An emotion is your brain’s creation of what your bodily sensations mean, in relation to what is going on around you in the world.”
Lisa Feldman Barrett

What if your emotions weren’t wild forces that happen to you, but creations your body and brain make together?

In this Olio, educator and performer Margherita Tisato, guides us along a curious and compassionate look at the anatomy of emotions: a living map that shows how sensations become feelings, and how those feelings guide our experience in the world.

Blending insights from neuroscience, trauma research, and embodiment practices, we’ll explore how emotions are both biology and biography, shaped by our nervous systems yet uniquely expressed through the lives we live. Through lecture, gentle inquiry and playful experimentation, we’ll learn to listen to the body as a co-author of our emotional stories.

If you’ve ever felt at odds with your emotions, or want to understand them more deeply, this Olio offers a new map to navigate their terrain.

After all, humans are gloriously emotional creatures, and feeling it all is part of what makes us alive.

As part of the evening, we will briefly explore how we can play with and investigate our body’s relationship to emotion through embodied practices such as BDSM, dance, Butoh, Shibari, and other forms of somatic exploration.

This evening will take the form of an interactive talk, blending ideas, stories, and guided experiments.

Evening Flow

7:00 PM – Doors open. Settle in, grab a drink, and meet a friend.
7:30 PM – The Olio begins: an intimate, interactive lecture and guided exploration.
8:30 PM – Instead of a traditional Q&A, we shift into a social experience—discussing ideas with others in the room while the teacher joins and floats between conversations.
10:00 PM - Last call at the bar and we'll start to wind down the evening.

Our Teacher for the Evening: Margherita Tisato

Margherita is a performer, an educator, a perpetual learner, and a subtle disruptor.

A dancer since childhood and an educator since their teenage years, their offerings now include experiential workshops in anatomy, pain science, embodiment, and trauma theory. Ever the movement enthusiast, they facilitate a wide range of experiences for groups and individuals, from meditation, yoga, and somatic movement to dance, Butoh, Shibari, and body suspension. They began teaching in jails and recovery programs in New York City in 2015.

In 2019, they co-founded Temple, a space in Brooklyn dedicated to the exploration of embodiment and community through kink and BDSM. They are also a founding member of All Queens, an organization providing peer-to-peer support and community for women and gender-expansive people impacted by the justice system.

Margherita has been a guest speaker at the University of Nebraska and the Transart Institute Creative Research PhD program at Liverpool John Moores University. They have taught dance repertory and technique at Loyola University in Chicago, Williams College in Massachusetts, and Ailey Fordham in New York. They also co-authored a paper on embodiment, new media, and addiction through the University of Nebraska RDAR program. They live in Brooklyn and are a proud cat lady.

What Is an Olio?

Think Olio is an ongoing experiment in lifelong learning.

We are a community of open-minded people who gather to exchange ideas with new friends and connect over art, literature, and philosophy.

An Olio is what we call the social learning events we’ve been organizing since 2015. Not quite a lecture and not quite an open discussion, an Olio is an intimate, interactive conversation led by a teacher who loves sharing their passions.

Our goal is to spark new perspectives, ignite curiosity, and enjoy ourselves socially—an alternative to typical nightlife options.

Photo by Zhi-Da Zhong

Biology & Biography of Emotions: A Felt Exploration of How Feelings Take Shape

Biology & Biography of Emotions: A Felt Exploration of How Feelings Take Shape