ABOUT

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

Dr. Pimentel is the Co-Director of Mindful USC at the University of Southern California.  Additionally, she teaches mindfulness at the UCLA Mindful Awareness Research Center (MARC) and is a dharma teacher at InsightLA. She is also featured on the Calm Health app. Dr. Pimentel’s writings on mindfulness have appeared in Lion’s Roar magazine and in Afrikan Wisdom: New Voices Talk Black Liberation, Buddhism and Beyond.  Many of her teachings and guided meditations can be found on the UCLA Mindful app.

Previously, Dr. Pimentel was a psychologist in private clinical practice, a senior psychologist at Bellevue Medical Center, and a clinical faculty member at NYU School of Medicine.  At Bellevue, she co-founded the Mind-Body Clinic, an outpatient service that brought mindfulness-based treatment approaches to people living with psychiatric and medical conditions. Presently, she teaches mindfulness full time; she no longer sees psychotherapy clients. 

Dr. Pimentel holds a bachelor’s degree, magna cum laude, from Brown University and a doctorate in Human Development and Psychology from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education.  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, Dr. Pimentel now lives in Los Angeles on unceded Tongva, Chumash, and Kizh land.  She loves sharing mindfulness and dharma teachings as a powerful path for individual and collective healing, wisdom, compassion and freedom.