Artist · Author · Choreographer
The streams that
meet in the work.
His practice is formed by several ways of knowing: family and place, classical and contemporary disciplines, spiritual study, and the ineffable lived experience of moving between categories.
His formation included work with Gilbert Mayer of the Paris Opera Ballet; Stanton Welch of Houston Ballet; Royal Ballet prima ballerina Margaret Barbieri; choreographer Dominic Walsh; and Desmond Richardson of Complexions Contemporary Ballet.
Across classical and contemporary repertory, Navaji became known for theatrical intelligence, technical precision, and emotionally lucid performance. He performed works by André Prokovsky, Frederick Ashton, Dame Ninette de Valois, John Cranko, and Sir Peter Wright; his principal, soloist, and featured roles include The Boyfriend in Matthew Bourne's Boutique, Balanchine's Divertimento No. 15, The Lover in Antony Tudor's Lilac Garden, Robert North's Troy Game, and Cassio in Peter Darrell's Othello. Contemporary credits include Dominic Walsh's Trilogy and Napoletani, and Leymis Wilmott's In Flight and Aftermath.
“David Nava’s clean technique boasts perfect fifth positions after every step and is only enhanced by his beautiful facilities, which include long lines and beautiful feet. His arabesques are cause for applause.”
Read the 2011 review ↗
A major injury to both ankles interrupted Navaji's early ballet career. During recovery in 2012, he underwent a near-death experience: accepting that his physical life had ended, encountering an “absolute beingness,” and then feeling vast consciousness condense as he returned to his body. He recounts the experience in Satori — My Brush With Infinity.
He returned with an urgent need for language. On the path to finding answers, he met Anthony Cowan, who would become a close friend and Pranic Healing mentor, as well as a bridge to anthroposophy, mysticism, comparative religion, global spiritual practices, and structured energetic-healing traditions. The name Navaji, lovingly given by Anthony, came to mark this new path.
The search became a practice. Inner vision and images became layered paintings; movement became a way to investigate consciousness through the body; and storytelling made difficult spiritual questions available to others.
In 2021, Navaji earned a Bachelor of Arts from The University of Texas at Austin and joined Austin ISD as a visual art teacher, working with more than 700 K–5 students each year. He brought the perspective of a working artist into the elementary classroom, treating arts education as cultural stewardship and an act of possibility; his projects have also connected performance and youth art with organizations including TreeFolks and The Contemporary Austin.
A founding dance artist with Ventana Ballet from 2018 to 2026, Navaji became Resident Choreographer in 2023 and Assistant Director in 2024. He led professional company class and rehearsals; coached classical technique, contemporary styling, interpretation, and repertory; and helped to cultivate the technical and performance standards for which the ensemble became known. His role extended beyond dance-making into dramaturgy, scenic design, costuming, visual development, and hands-on production.
Founded in 2017, ATMA Moves is his methodology for bringing energetic awareness into professional performance. At its core is Pranic Dance, an original practice integrating Pranic Healing with classical ballet and contemporary technique, which trains the body not only as an instrument of expression but as a vessel of conscious perception, energetic responsibility, and service. Grounded in compassionate rigor, it replaces cruelty and comparison with reverence and disciplined care.
KOMOREBI became the fullest expression of this philosophy, marking the first Ventana production to expand into custom large scale set design, completely original costuming, and full-scale immersive world-building. Drawing on nature, his family's Indigenous roots in South Texas, and experiences of trauma and recovery, Navaji wrote, choreographed, produced, and directed the evening-length work; he designed and built its set and costumes, created its digital backdrop and music mix, and trained the cast through ATMA Moves, shaping the whole environment with the care of a healing space. The 2023 premiere included five sold out mainstage performances and two sold out interactive children's presentations.
“KOMOREBI… altogether possessed the intense beauty that makes ballet so beloved of so many.”
Read the KOMOREBI review ↗
Across other Ventana productions, including Variations on a Love Theme, KALEIDOSCOPE, UNDEAD, ALLUVIUS, and Frostbite, his contributions were insturmental and encompassed assistant and rehearsal direction, full sets and scenic elements, original and reconstructed costumes, styling, graphic design, photography editing, and production imagery—the visual language and practical systems that carry a work from rehearsal room to stage.
That work began with Ventana Ballet and expanded across the city's independent arts community, notably including Red Nightfall Dance Theatre, founded by Dorothy O'Shea Overbey. In the 2024 ballet MoonFall, Navaji performed the title role of The Moon and designed the set, uniting performance, visual storytelling, and production support within one work. Following this collaboration, his relationship with the company deepened into a multi-dimensional partnership. Through his firm, BrightFolk Consulting Navaji aong with Co-founder Aidan DeWitt, provided ongoing strategic design for the theater company, orchestrating their comprehensive brand identity, digital marketing campaigns, and promotional architecture.
“Nava… has the quicksilver emotionality characteristic of great actors… He is a natural.”
Read the MoonFall review ↗
In 2025, Navaji co-produced the Sharanagathi Festival of Arts, Austin's annual celebration of South Indian classical arts presented by Temple of Fine Arts Texas and directed by Sivakami Sreenivasan—a collaboration that reflects his commitment to helping distinct artistic lineages develop their work with care.
His impact is both visible and behind the scenes: the eye of a director, the knowledge of a performer, and the practical imagination of a maker—helping Austin artists develop the confidence, structure, and creative language that allow work to endure.
Through Anthony Cowan, Navaji entered the Pranic Healing lineage of Master Choa Kok Sui and learned to pair intuitive perception with repeatable protocols. As a practitioner of Pranic Healing, he offers a structured, no-touch practice supporting energetic balance, emotional and physical well-being, space clearing, transitional care, and spiritual development. His approach is compassionate and methodical, grounded in the belief that healing can restore a person's relationship with their inner life.
For Navaji, healing and art are not separate careers. Both require sensitivity, presence, ethical intention, and attention to what is not immediately visible; that shared discipline informs his paintings, his private practice, ATMA Moves, and his productions like KOMOREBI.
Pranic Healing is complementary spiritual wellness—not a replacement for medical or mental-health care.
As a self-taught painter and photographer, Navaji developed his visual practice alongside his life in dance, using a period of recovery from a major ankle injury to cultivate his eye for light and composition. In 2020–2021, he created his first comprehensive body of acrylic and mixed-media work that translated meditation, intuitive perception, mythology, and spiritual inquiry into layered form. Light-responsive paintings such as The Powers, RA, and Satori use UV-sensitive and phosphorescent pigments, so that a single work reveals different visual states as illumination changes. In 2021, he presented the work as a participating artist in Big Medium's Austin Studio Tour; its broader argument is gathered in his Selected 2-D Practice.
His photography extends the same interest in inner identity through constructed portraiture and creative direction. In the ongoing ATMA Artist series, he photographs subjects through archetypal, mythic, and spiritually charged visual identities, drawing on his experience with movement, painting, theatrical light, costume, and direction. Commissioned campaigns for The Burn Room show another register of that authorship—editorial portraiture, kinesthetic direction, humor, and public visual strategy; a recent seasonal campaign surpassed 101,000 organic views within its first twelve hours.
Current research continues to move between dimensions. What Makes Wings begins in the symbolic world of The Powers and is developing outward through drawing, costume, wearable form, and spatial research—one example of how his 2-D and 3-D practices continually feed one another.
A Soul's Life, an independently written and illustrated series, invites children and adults to approach the idea of a soul entering human life with wonder rather than fear. Published in 2023, Book 1: The Soul carries the symbolic and cosmic visual language of his paintings into full-page digital illustration.
He is also developing ATMA Moves: A Philosophy of Conscious Movement, Energy & Sacred Motion, a book-length manuscript gathering the philosophical, somatic, artistic, and ethical foundations behind the practice. Its role is not to replace lived practice, but to give language to a body of study developed over years.
On legacy“The brilliance of our legacy will be measured by the magnitude of our mental, emotional, and spiritual development.”