About Me

Allyson Pimentel, EdD | Psychologist and Mindfulness Meditation Teacher

Dr. Allyson Pimentel is a psychologist and long-time Vipassana meditation practitioner and teacher who works at the intersections of mindfulness, mental health, healing, and social justice. Allyson has been teaching mindfulness in clinical, medical, secular and spiritual settings for nearly twenty years.  

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Allyson serves as the Co-Director of Mindful USC at the University of Southern California.  Additionally, she teaches at the UCLA Mindful Awareness Research Center (MARC) and is a board member and teacher at InsightLA. Her writings on mindfulness have appeared in Lion’s Roar magazine and in Afrikan Wisdom: New Voices Talk Black Liberation, Buddhism and Beyond.  Previously, Allyson was a psychologist in private clinical practice and a senior psychologist at Bellevue Medical Center in New York City.  At Bellevue, Allyson co-founded the Mind-Body Clinic, a service that brought mindfulness-based treatment approaches to people living with psychiatric and medical conditions. 

Allyson holds a bachelor’s degree, magna cum laude, from Brown University and a doctorate in Human Development and Psychology from Harvard University.  She has completed numerous professional mindfulness teacher training programs, as well as dedicated practitioner courses in the Vipassana/Insight meditation tradition, and also is a registered yoga teacher.  Originally from New York, Allyson now lives with her family in Los Angeles on unceded Tongva, Chumash, and Kizh land.  She loves sharing mindfulness as a pathway for individual and collective healing, wisdom, and freedom.