Rita is the founder and former editor-in-chief of Fit Yoga magazine (2002-2010), and is the author of Yoga Heals Your Back (Fairwinds, 2005). For nearly two decades, she has taught yoga for various departments of Stamford Hospital in Stamford, Connecticut, including the long-running, popular Vinyasa classes at The Sarner Health and Fitness Institute. At the hospital’s Bennett Cancer Center, Rita has built a strong yoga community for cancer patients and survivors, and she has worked closely with both the chief of cardiology and the senior exercise physiologist as the case manager/stress-management facilitator for the Dr. Dean Ornish Program for the Reversal of Heart Disease, as well as Intensive Cardiac Rehab. Rita also provided resources and services for Stamford Hospital’s Psychiatric Department, helping to implement weekly meditation classes. She developed yoga for cancer video sequences on You Tube for the Connecticut Challenge, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting healthy lifestyle choices for cancer survivors, where, for many years, she served as teacher-trainer, and senior teacher, and more recently helped create a robust library of both restorative and therapeutic classes for My Victory, an online streaming platform focusing on cancer survivors.

Rita has presented yoga therapy to medical students at Yale University, St. Vincent’s Nursing College, and Northern Westchester Medical School as well as several national yoga conferences, including the International Yoga Therapy Conference and the Montreal International Symposium for Therapy and Yoga. Her article, Open Heart Yoga, was published in the spring of 2011, for the medical journal, Topics in Geriatric Rehabilitation (TGR). She currently offers Yoga for Chronic Disease and Restorative Teacher Training, as part of several studio 200/300 hour yoga teacher trainings, and as a stand-alone immersion.