About
Najmeh Hoseini, PhD
Neuroscience educator · Physical therapist · Self-taught visual artist · Los Angeles
Three practices that pulled me back.
I grew up in Iran. I came to the U.S. to study the brain. For more than a decade I taught physical therapy students by day and painted alone at night, never expecting the two worlds would meet.
Then 2020 happened. I was alone in a Los Angeles apartment, navigating chronic immune issues no specialist could quite explain, and the loneliness of the pandemic was doing what loneliness does to a nervous system.
What pulled me out wasn't talk therapy or productivity hacks. It was three practices I returned to every day: somatic movement, meditation, and painting. The body, the breath, the brush. Slowly, the loop broke.
When the world reopened, I started teaching what had saved me — small workshops at first, then larger ones. In 2024 I published peer-reviewed research on meditation. In 2026 I returned to the Society for Brain Mapping and Therapeutics, where seven years earlier I had given talks on brain stimulation, as the first Chairwoman of the new Art and the Brain panel.
Paint Your Nervous System is the work I've waited my whole career to teach.
On the painting.
My practice sits at the intersection of two disciplines that have shaped my life: neuroscience and painting. I am a PhD-trained neuroscientist and physical therapist who has spent more than a decade teaching the brain to doctoral students. I am also an Iranian-American, self-taught artist whose work — figurative, painterly, and emotionally layered — explores the body as a site of memory, resilience, and transformation.
The figures in my work are usually women. Sometimes mythic — angels, hybrids, dancers in motion. Sometimes political, emerging from the Woman, Life, Freedom movement of my home country. Sometimes anatomical, drawn from a clinical decade spent inside the science of the nervous system. What unites them is a single inquiry: how does the body carry its history, and how does it find its way through?
I paint to translate what cannot be measured: the felt sense of being a body, in a moment, in a history.
Education & roles.
- PhD, KinesiologyWith neurophysiology focus — the neuroscience of movement
- MSPT, Physical TherapyMaster of Science in Physical Therapy · California-licensed
- Professor, Doctor of Physical Therapy programWest Coast University · currently teaching neuroscience and neurology
- ProfessorMidwestern University · 2015 – 2019
- Founder, Paint Your Nervous SystemWorkshops and upcoming retreats on movement, meditation, and painting
- Chairwoman, Art and the Brain panelSociety for Brain Mapping & Therapeutics (SBMT) · 2026, inaugural chair
Selected shows.
- 2026First Chairwoman, Art and the Brain Panel · Society for Brain Mapping and Therapeutics (SBMT), Los Angeles, CA
- 2026Art Exhibition at the SBMT Gala · Biltmore Hotel, Los Angeles, CA
- 2026Mindfulness Art Workshop · Los Angeles, CA
- 2025Art of Calm Workshop and Retreat · Los Angeles, CA
- 2025Selected for LAAA Art Auction · Los Angeles, CA
- 2025Mind in Balance solo exhibition · Glenmark Hotel, Glendale, CA
- 2024 & 2025Selected in Village Art Guild Open Juried Show · Westlake, CA
- 2023 & 2024Art Exhibition · Pershing Square Building, DTLA, Los Angeles, CA
- 2021Art Exhibition fundraiser for Phoenix Dream Center · Arizona
Selected media.
- PodcastVirtually Guided Meditation (West Coast University)→
- DocumentaryPlaying My Mind's Symphony→
- Publication · 2024The effect of a 6-week virtually guided meditation program on DPT students' perceived well-being→
- PublicationNeuroplasticity research · Brain Research→
- Podcast · FarsiHeech Magoo podcast interview→
