About Luz Marina Díaz

Luz Marina Díaz was born in Caracas, Venezuela. She spent much of her early life working as a system analyst, dancing, choreographing, and teaching in two major modern dance companies in Venezuela. Then, in 1994, she came to New York and discovered her vocation as a religious educator, spiritual director, and liturgical dancer.


She has more than 20 years of service in catechetical leadership as director of religious education and RCIA. She received a spiritual director certificate from Fairfield University in 2010 and a spiritual direction supervisor certificate from Fordham University in 2022. In addition, she attended workshops on spiritual direction supervision in 2018 with Lucy Abbott Tucker.


Diaz's spiritual director training focused on a contemplative, evocative, and compassionate model with a concentration on teaching, and guiding Ignatius Loyola's Spiritual Exercises. Her final project to obtain the Advanced Certificate in Supervision was a qualitative research on Internal Family Systems and Inner Relationship Focusing; she proposed an IFS-informed Spiritual Direction/Supervision model.


Since 2010, she has been providing spiritual direction through monthly one-to-one sessions, group spiritual direction, 19 annotation of Loyola’s spiritual exercises, and 8-day directed Ignatian retreats at Eastern Point Retreat Center.


She holds a bachelor's degree in computer science from Universidad Central de Venezuela, a Master of Arts in Religious Education (M.A.), and a Doctorate (Ph.D.) in Religious Education from Fordham University. In her Ph.D. dissertation titled Spiritual Conversation as Religiously Educative: Education toward Wisdom, Diaz studied the practice of Spiritual Conversation in three contexts: spiritual direction, Rite of Christian Initiation (RCIA), and biomedicine.


From 2016 to 2018, Díaz taught Theology of Spiritual Direction; since 2018, she has been the director of the Spiritual Direction Practicum at Fordham University.