Carola Trier: The First to Open Her Own Studio With Joseph Pilates' Blessing

Carola Strauss was born in 1913, the second daughter of the German chemist and philosopher Eduard Strauss and Beatrice Rosenberg, an American citizen. She studied at the Philanthropin in Frankfurt and later at Rudolf von Laban’s dance school — training that would eventually lead her to make a living as a dancer, acrobat, and roller-skating contortionist. Before she ever met Joseph Pilates, she was a professional of the body in the most literal sense possible: someone who folded herself in half for a living.

An internment camp before a studio

The war caught her in Europe. Her family emigrated to the United States in 1938, but she stayed behind, first in Germany and then in France. Because of her German nationality, she was sent to the Gurs internment camp in southern France — from which she was released in 1942 with the help of a fellow dancer, Marcel Neydorf. That same year, with support from her parents and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, she emigrated to the United States as a refugee and settled in New York, where she married Edgar Trier.

From a knee injury to a studio of her own

For the rest of the 1940s she made a living as a dancer, acrobat, and roller-skating contortionist. A knee injury ended that career in 1950. Seeking treatment, she met Dr. Henry Jordan of Lenox Hill Hospital, who introduced her to Joseph Pilates. She became his student and, in time, a recognized expert in the method — enough so that, in 1960, she opened her own Contrology studio. According to second-generation teacher Jillian Hessel, Trier was “the first person to open a studio with Joe Pilates’ blessing.” It happened seven years before he died, in 1967: the method’s dispersion didn’t begin after his death, as the story is sometimes told. It began during his lifetime, with his explicit consent.

The teacher of other teachers

Trier’s studio wasn’t just the first outside Joseph Pilates’ direct circle. It was also a training ground for the next generation: her assistants included Romana Kryzanowska and Kathy Grant, two names that would go on to have careers of their own just as consequential as hers. Trier died in 2000, leaving behind a lineage that, without her, would likely have taken much longer to escape 939 Eighth Avenue.

Why this matters today

Trier’s story disproves a comfortable idea: that today’s Pilates, with its thousands of independent studios, is a late deviation from a method Joseph Pilates wanted to keep closed and centralized. He didn’t. He allowed it for Carola Trier, by name, in his own lifetime, seven years before he died. In that sense, the method’s dispersion is as much a part of its original legacy as any exercise in the 1945 book.