Kristina Lanuza - Sumukhi Devi
Principal
Musician • Yoga Teacher • Producer
Kristina Lanuza — known to her students and listeners as Sumukhi Devi — is a musician, yoga teacher, and producer whose work bridges sound and spiritual practice. Based in Austin, Texas, she began practicing and teaching yoga in 1997, and in 2000 founded Yogafly, built on the idea that yoga can help a person feel both free and grounded.
Her path deepened in 2001, when she traveled to Ananda Ashram in Monroe, New York, and encountered the teachings of Shri Brahmananda Sarasvati (Ramamurti S. Mishra), known to his students as Guruji. His emphasis on pulsation, vibration, nature, meditation, Sanskrit, and what he called the Music of Silence became a lasting influence on both her teaching and her music — fusing her two callings, sound and yoga, into a single practice.
Throughout college at St. Edward’s University and after from 1997 - 2001, she performed in bands in Austin, Texas such as Buttahfly, an all-female soul, R&B and jazz ensemble, So Coracao where she and Cynthia Espinal performed and sang in Spanish, Portuguese and sometimes in her native tongue from the Philippines: Tagalog on many stages in the Austin area. Kristina has also collaborated with Kat Kaliski performing jazz standards throughout central Texas and has studied classical opera and music. She has also performed with symphonies at the Brevard Music Center and collaborated with musicians such as Russill Paul, Evan Gray, Tim Adams and more.
As a musician, she released Deva in 2011, a full album of chants for yoga and meditation. She has continued recording in Austin, Texas since, including the track “Who Am I?,” “Patience,” “Samsara” and later devotional work such as a rendition of the 108 Names of Ganesha, alongside collaborative ensemble pieces like “Sexy Yoga Teacher” to feature music from American Yoga, the Musical.
In 2015, she opened Yoga Illumined in Austin on South Congress where she hosted weekly musical gatherings, kirtan, dance and more featuring local Austin and traveling musicians.
Today, working under the name Sumukhi Devi, she leads Yoga Illumined, a platform for deepening yoga practice through teaching, music and production via Yoga La La Productions, and a podcast called The Word with Sumukhi and Damien B. Davis. She continues to lead yoga teacher trainings and immersions in and around Austin and throughout the world.
Heather Osterman-Davis
Principal
Heather Osterman-Davis is an award-winning writer, filmmaker, educator, and former performer whose work spans literary nonfiction, journalism, screenwriting, film, comedy, playwriting, and live performance.
She is a prolific writer, whose work has appeared in over fifty journals and news sites. Some of these include such places as The New York Times; Huffington Post; Creative Non-Fiction; Time; Al-Jazeera; Slate; Parents; McSweeney’s; The Washington Post; River Teeth; and Tin House. She is particularly interested in stories that explore family, identity, gender, disability, education, and the often unexpected intersections between the personal and the political.
She received her MA from University of Texas at Austin in Communications, and upon graduation went on to teach Business and Communications at the undergraduate level, before joining Texas based company Ignite! There she worked on implementing a multiple-based intelligence curriculum in schools across Texas and beyond.
In 2024, Osterman-Davis and writing partner Sarah Ball won the Austin Film Festival Comedy Teleplay Pilot Award for Florence Unfiltered, a comedic television pilot that reimagines Florence Nightingale as a rebellious, ambitious woman determined to break through the restrictions imposed on women of her era. The script was also selected as a finalist in the festival's Josephson Entertainment Screenwriting Fellowship.
Her film work includes the award-winning short Tell-By-Date, which she co-wrote with Ball and produced, starring Brian Michael Smith, an actor known for his work on Lonestar 911. Osterman-Davis also served as a producer on this film. They are now turning this into a feature length script.
For years, she performed as a stand-up comedienne in venues all over Texas, including Austin’s Velveeta Room, and Cap City Comedy Club. She was a finalist in The Funniest Person in Austin contest.
In the musical theater world, she produced and co-wrote a musical with Dara Barlin, entitled, (In)Fidelity, which was staged at Wow Cafe Theater as a work in progress.
She is in the final stages of completing a novel, a rom-com, about two strangers from Austin, who fall in love during a road trip across Texas. She was a founding member of the now defunct Austin Writers Grrlls, and had both poetry and short fiction included in their first anthology.