Meet ‘The Dancing Nurse,’ Tara Rynders: Bringing Hope & Healing Through Movement

Image source: The Clinic

For many nurses facing burnout and grief, healing can feel out of reach. But registered nurse and dancer Tara Rynders found a unique path: movement as medicine.

Known as "The Dancing Nurse," Tara combines her passion for compassionate care with the art of dance to support nurses and healthcare workers experiencing compassion fatigue, trauma, and emotional exhaustion. Through performances, workshops, and her organization, The Clinic, she is creating new pathways toward resilience and joy for caregivers.

Healing Through Dance

Tara's journey began as a refuge in dance during a challenging childhood and continued as a tool to connect with her sister after a debilitating illness. While working as a nurse and dancer, she realized that self-care and receiving care are hard for nurses, who are often conditioned to give endlessly.

Tara has been a registered nurse for over 20 years with a BSN from University of Nevada at Reno, and a Masters in Fine Arts with specialization in Dance and Somatic Practices from University of Colorado Boulder. She is also a Certified Grief Recovery Specialist.

Reflecting on her personal experience, Tara shared in a LinkedIn post, "Dance was my first medicine. Growing up, it was how I processed everything life threw at me.​”

A life-changing experience with an empathetic nurse during her own medical crisis inspired her to share the power of compassionate connection through movement. She recently told Dance Magazine, “I remember softening into my nurse’s hand and feeling so grateful that she remembered my heart, and remembered me as a person. I learned something by letting myself receive care, and I wanted to share that.”​

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In 2017, Tara founded The Art and Heart of Healthcare Institute, which offers expressive arts workshops and immersive experiences designed to combat burnout and isolation among healthcare professionals.

Her signature (Re)Brilliancy workshops use dance, music, poetry, and improv performance to help nurses remember their brilliance and foster community and healing. These workshops often end in joyful, spontaneous dance celebrations, giving nurses a moment of freedom from their demanding roles. And in a two-year collaboration with Kaiser Permanente, Rynders worked with 600 nurses and found that participants experienced notable decreases in burnout, secondary traumatic stress, self-judgment, and loneliness, while self-kindness increased—demonstrating the powerful impact of her movement-based healing approach.

Performances That Heal

Through movement and storytelling, Tara gives voice to the unspoken emotions of nurses and healthcare teams confronting burnout and grief.

Her solo piece, A Nurse is Calling, draws directly from her experiences in an emergency room. She described it as a “love letter to nurses and caregivers who give everything and deserve everything in return.” It portrays the irony of being celebrated as a “healthcare hero” while simultaneously feeling isolated and overwhelmed by systemic challenges. In one memorable scene, she uses boxing gloves to symbolize fighting an invisible opponent—the broken healthcare system.

 

Her performance, First Do No Harm, was an immersive theater experience staged at Rose Medical Center in Denver where she worked. Developed with collaborators, it explores grief, burnout, and compassion fatigue from the perspectives of nurses, patients’ families, and caregivers. The performance transforms hospital spaces into scenes that reveal the emotional labor of caregiving and creates a space for authentic conversations about the toll of healthcare work.​

 

The Clinic: Healing Burnout Through Art

Beyond performance, Tara is deeply involved in therapeutic programming for nurses through The Clinic, an organization she created to offer healing arts workshops and reduce compassion fatigue. Participants engage in guided movement, creative expression, and storytelling designed to release trauma and reclaim joy.

Tara describes The Clinic as “a safe, communal space for artists, nurses, patients, and the community to commune together through the arts… We believe that the arts bring healing into the hospital and that this leads to better patient outcomes in the hospital setting, decreased compassion fatigue, and decreased nursing burn-out.” The Clinic also facilitates Resiliency Moments, intimate sessions connecting artists with healthcare workers to promote healing and grief processing.​

 

Empathy in Motion

Tara’s approach to healing is deeply personal. She reflects on her own experience with compassion fatigue and the power of dance to restore her emotional connection to patients. 

After the loss of her mother and brother, Tara turned to choreography as a vital way to process her grief and gradually rebuild her capacity to care. In the AMA Journal of Ethics, she writes about how movement became a container for her emotions and a path to rediscovering joy, hope, and connection. This healing through dance deeply informs her work today. She sees her mission as creating spaces where nurses can feel truly seen, honored, and supported as they navigate their own emotional journeys.

Tara’s message to nurses is clear: taking time to care for yourself is not only necessary but vital to continuing the work of caring for others. Nurses must give themselves permission to rest, grieve, and find joy. Through art and community, she is helping caregivers everywhere rediscover their wholeness — one movement at a time.

Nurses can learn more about Tara’s workshops and upcoming performances at TaraRynders.com.

 

🤔 Nurses: what do you think about healing through dance? Let us know in the discussion forum below.