Diana Vera
Prague rope teacher with a background in therapy training and theatre, who began tying in 2013, has run courses since 2016 and in 2024 launched an eight-day training cycle that treats technique, communication and consent together; she teaches mainly at Alive Kinbaku Dojo and Klub Ateliér.
Diana Vera is a shibari teacher in Prague. Her own website, in Czech, is the main source for her career, and the facts below are as she reports them there.
Background and path into rope
Before she began tying, she writes, she trained as a therapist and studied at DAMU, which the school itself describes as the theatre faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. She also trained in the RUŠ therapy method and took part in family constellation work, tantric circles and conscious BDSM evenings. She dates her first experience with rope to 2013. From 2014 she practiced technique daily while attending the early courses of the Czech shibari community, which invited teachers from abroad, and from 2019 she took courses with the School of the Art of Love (Škola umění milování).
She names four people as formative. Kristina Marlen, a tantric dominatrix in Berlin, was the first woman she saw tie a man. From the Brno rigger Soptík she took the blunt advice to tie whatever moves, and from the Vienna rigger Barkas the advice to wait for an answer, which she uses to read how the tied person is feeling. Pedro Cordas in Lisbon showed her how far a rigger can guide someone through rope.
Teaching
According to her timeline she began private rope sessions in 2015 and courses in 2016, at first under a Femdom shibari label for women who wanted to tie men; from 2019 her workshops were open to all genders, orientations and role preferences. In 2024 she created an eight-day training, Shibari Session, held one Tuesday and Wednesday a month at Klub Ateliér in Strašnice, the venue where she first taught; she says its first 21 participants finished in spring 2024. Her current program runs from a full-day beginners’ course through a foundations day to themed workshops and evening meetings, and she teaches most of her courses at Alive Kinbaku Dojo in Letná, which lists her among its guest teachers. She has also taught as a guest in Brno and twice at the Prague Shibari Festival, and has been part of the team of Zajíci, a one-day BDSM conference for beginners, every year since 2015.
She describes her method as slower and deeper than many classes, with small groups, the risks of each tie named and ties adapted to the person’s body, age and fitness. Communication, reading a partner and negotiating boundaries are taught alongside technique, and she sums up her stance as offering rather than pressing, pointing students to other teachers as well.