About the teaching
Mary Anne Campbell
Mary Anne is a skilled, observant and effective teacher and clinician. Credentialed by the Foundation for the Equestrian Arts as an instructor in classical dressage, Mary Anne has an international following and regularly teaches dressage across the US and in Europe. Mary Anne has the deep, old knowledge based in the literature of thousands of years of equitation, a degree in art, and decades of riding and teaching experience to bring all of this home to you.
Mary Anne’s work is guided by the unique mentality of the student she’s mentoring. If you’re a ‘top down’ learner, you’ll find the theoretical basis on which to build your riding. At the same time, she’ll help your brain begin to integrate with your body more and more effectively.
If you’re a kinesthetic, or a heart-felt learner, you’ll be working in a movement, or a connection based series of lessons as Mary Anne will slowly help your mind begin to make sense of the interaction.
Enjoying people as much as she does horses, Mary Anne meets you where you are and helps you develop into the best rider you can be.
The community around the work
French Classical Riding is all about connection. Over the years at the Snohomish location the work developed a marvelous community of friends and fellow riders, and that family extends to places all over the world, from Snohomish to Stockholm to Mount Gambier to Addis Ababa and more. Craig Stevens and Mary Anne Campbell, along with senior students created The Foundation for the Equestrian Arts to preserve this older way of working, and the Foundation is very active in supporting new trainers to become skilled and adept and confirmed in the older way of interacting with the horse and the rider.
Mary Anne currently serves on the board of the Foundation and is working on several books with the Foundation’s translation group- if you are fluent in French, Spanish or Portuguese and studying with a credentialed French Classical instructor, we invite you to join the group! It’s fun and whew— is it fascinating to read the old masters in their own words.
But that’s the distinction of this older way of working, it’s so enjoyable to interact with real connection with the horse, and to interact with real connection with other human beings too. Those healthy, joy-filled connections are an expression of what makes French Classical work unique among the disciplines still practiced today.