Marion Rosen


Marion Rosen was a German-American physiotherapist. She developed the Rosen Method, a bodywork that was named after her.

Biography

Rosen was born in Nuremberg in Germany in 1914 into a Jewish household. Before World War II, Rosen fled Germany for the United States. She settled in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she lived for the rest of her life.
Through her training with Elsa Gindler's student Lucy Heyer in the 1930s and long career as a physical therapist, Rosen developed a particular approach to the body and eventually began teaching it to others. She synthesized her approach into a system of Rosen Method bodywork, in which a practitioner identifies and works on areas of habitual muscular tension in the client; and movement, which involves a series of gentle movements done to music, as a form of preventative physiotherapy.
The Rosen Institute she founded in Berkeley in the 1980s pioneered research into incorporating dance approaches in physical therapy. The institute has affiliate training centers in 16 countries across the world. In her 70-year career as a physiotherapist, Rosen cared for between 30,000 and 40,000 patients.
Marion Rosen continued to teach, hold workshops, and see patients until she suffered a stroke in late 2011. She died at 97 years old on January 18, 2012, in Berkeley, California.