About us
Alison Taylor, OTR/L, CHT, CKTI
My name is Alison Taylor, and I am an Occupational Therapist (OT) and Certified Hand Therapist (CHT) with 25 years of experience. I grew up in a wonderful beach town in Australia called Wollongong and moved to the USA after graduating from Sydney University with my OT degree. My goal was to become a specialist in neurology and treat stroke patients and head injuries. I completed all my Neuro-Developmental Therapy (NTD) certifications within the first four years of working, even reaching the advanced upper extremity level.
I love to travel, which led me to become a traveling therapist, embarking on adventures across the USA and living in eight or more states. My home in the USA has always been in Georgia, primarily Atlanta, where I started my first hand therapy job and eventually built my career in hand therapy. Over the years, I also traveled back and forth to Australia, living in Western Australia, Queensland, and New South Wales. My first son, Lachlan, was born in Perth, and my second son, Callum, was born in Atlanta.
In Atlanta in 1996, I took my first Kinesio class and loved it. However, since I was not working full-time, I didn't utilize the techniques as much as I could have. I was always intrigued by it, and eventually, I moved to Texas, where I hosted another class approximately six years later. At that time, I was no longer working directly with surgeons, which allowed me to tape a lot of patients and I had time to practice.
I became a Kinesio Instructor in 2011 and actively taught across the USA. By 2016, the Kinesio lecture content evolved, placing more emphasis on superficial layer taping. This new approach led to significant improvements in my patients, prompting me to start videotaping the outcomes. Over two years, I felt it was the right time to share this new way of thinking, so I began posting my experiences online—on Facebook and eventually LinkedIn.
Fast forward ten years, and I am now teaching my original concepts along with many new ideas. I have taught in over eight different countries and participated in eight ASHT conferences. I have also been an invited speaker at all major international hand therapy and surgery conferences, including serving as the keynote speaker at the Asia Pacific Hand Conference in Singapore in 2023.
I am thrilled to share my discoveries with all of you on this platform, and I believe it will be an endless educational adventure. My hope is that with this information, you will begin to see your patients in a completely new and exciting way, achieving outcomes and healing timelines you have never experienced before. You will learn to look at the body from an entirely new perspective—insights that are not typically taught in school. Please enjoy this platform, and thank you for your support.
Rita Wania, PhD, OT, CHT
Hi, I'm Rita, an Austrian hand therapist and managing director of the Alison Taylor Academy. Let me tell you a little bit about myself! I haven't always been an occupational therapist (OT). I first trained as a biologist and did my PhD in Bristol, UK, in climate change research. I authored and co-authored 14 peer-reviewed articles, spoke at international conferences and was on the editorial board of the highly renowned journal Global Change Biology. I stayed in academia for a few years after finishing my PhD before I decided to head in a completely new direction. I was 36 years old when I started OT school in Austria. Hand therapy quickly became my favorite subject and a few years into working as an OT, I decided to focus purely on this field. That was also why I took the CHT exam in November 2024 and became the first Austrian (as far as I know) who is certified by the US-based Hand Therapy Certification Commission (HTCC).
In 2020 I attended Alison’s first online courses and was immediately hooked on the sheer magic that she could do. I took all six online courses that were available back then and implemented a lot of her approaches and techniques immediately in my practice. At the same time I started my own online courses focusing on the well-being of therapists' own hands, which often ache because of our work in the clinic. Through this work I gained experience in running an online business. In 2022 I suggested to the Austrian Society for Hand Therapy to invite Alison to come to Austria to teach some live courses, and in 2024 the time had finally arrived. Seeing Alison doing her magic on video is one thing, but seeing it live was just jaw-dropping.
As you can see, I’m a huge fan of Alison’s work! But I'm still a science girl at heart, so I keep asking questions about why and how the magic works. Because (here's the secret!) it’s not really magic, it’s just that Alison has a hugely creative mind and recognizes connections between anatomy, neurology and physiology that people haven’t considered before. To people who don’t know Alison’s techniques, she looks like a magician, but for all those therapists (and nowadays also surgeons) who have studied her approaches, it looks like a really smart, really novel way to treat our patients in a very effective way and, more importantly, without causing any pain.
Alison talked about the Alison Taylor Academy already during her visit to Vienna, and in February 2025 we decided to join forces and draw from each other’s talents to make it a reality. And here we are...
