Bentley Fazi

Maryland Roots, Arizona Mat

Originally from Maryland, Bentley Fazi moved to Scottsdale, Arizona in 2011. That relocation turned out to be more consequential than it might have looked at the time. Over a decade ago, she walked into her first heated power yoga flow, quickly fell in love with the mental benefits as well as the physical, and eventually left her full-time job in 2016 to completely dedicate herself to yoga and becoming an instructor. That kind of pivot — quitting stable employment to step onto a mat for a living — is either reckless or clarifying. In Bentley Fazi's case, it reads as the latter.

She went on to earn a Master's in Communication with a focus in Social Technologies from Arizona State University in 2019, which tells you something about how seriously she takes the craft of building an audience. This isn't someone who fell into wellness content by accident. Bentley received her 200-hour Yoga Alliance certification through Modern Yoga Scottsdale, and classes under her name now live on multiple platforms simultaneously.

One Career, Two Lanes

As Social Media Marketing Manager for ALO Yoga, Bentley shares her knowledge of yoga and wellness through content creation curated for the ALO Yoga Channel. The dual role — practitioner and platform builder — is genuinely unusual. Most yoga instructors who move into brand work drift away from the mat. Bentley Fazi has kept both lanes active and running in parallel.

She works as Assistant Community Manager for Alo Yoga, overseeing the Instagram challenge community, which means she's the person architecting how tens of thousands of people engage with one of the most visible yoga brands in the world. Beyond Alo Yoga, she has partnerships and collaborations with Thirty Three Threads, Civana Wellness Resort, 1 Hotels, the Arizona Diamondbacks, Pukka Herbal Teas, Dearfoams, and more. Dearfoams — a footwear brand — is worth noting. That's not a random collab for someone whose feet are as distinctively shaped as hers are.

Her classes incorporate elements of patience and acceptance, and always include elements of creativity and challenge, encouraging students to explore outside their comfort zones. The sequencing she builds — fluid, inventive, physically demanding — puts her feet through a full vocabulary of positions in every single session. Which brings us to the part that matters most on this site.

The Lift That Doesn't Quit

The first thing that registers when you look at Bentley Fazi's feet in practice is the pull of the arch away from the mat. Not a subtle lean. A committed, almost architectural rise from heel to the ball of the foot that happens regardless of whether she's standing, transitioning, or pushing through a held pose. In tadasana — mountain pose, theoretically the most neutral position in yoga — the midfoot already lifts clear. The mat disappears beneath it.

What makes this pair genuinely interesting to study is how the arch behaves under load. A lot of high-arch feet will soften when weight comes through them fully — the structure compresses, the medial line drops, the dramatic curve flattens out under the body's mass. That doesn't happen here. In lunges, in warriors, in transitions where the full bodyweight shifts onto a single foot, the arch holds its shape. Sustained. It's the word that belongs to these feet.

The instep is the giveaway. When the foot flexes forward — heel pressing back, toes extending, the full articulation you get in a deep runner's lunge or a virasana — the instep doesn't just rise, it lengthens. The curve goes from steep and compact to an elongated ridge, the kind that creates a real gap between the upper of any open shoe and the skin beneath. In slides or open-toe yoga sandals, that gap reads immediately. Your eye falls straight to it.

The forefoot is notably wide relative to where the arch narrows. That contrast — the broad spread of the toes against the deep inward pull at the midfoot — gives the foot a distinctly tapered geometry. The toes themselves are well-proportioned, the second only marginally longer than the first, the line declining gradually. At rest, the whole silhouette is composed. Under tension it sharpens, the arch lifting a degree further, the instep ridge becoming more pronounced.

Skin tone is warm and well-maintained — consistent with someone who spends real time outdoors and takes the care seriously. No visible roughness at the heel or ball. For feet that spend this many hours on grip mats, on hardwood floors, in and out of Alo footwear across brand shoots and studio sessions, they're kept in genuinely good condition.

Heels do something specific to this arch. Elevating the heel compresses the already-high foot into a position where the arch appears almost exaggerated — the curve accelerating fast from where the heel lifts to where the toes begin. The silhouette becomes more dramatic, not less. Open heels show the whole shape. There's no flatness to hide. Nothing about this foot disappears in a heel.

What the Mat Reveals

As part of the LGBTQIA+ community, Bentley integrates her love and desire for all people to live their truth in both her practice and yoga teachings, on and off their mats. That phrase — on and off the mat — is one she returns to often, and it's earned. Yoga was Bentley's path to discovering her truth, its guidance and sheer force paving the way to reveal who she really was, becoming the unexpected but necessary pivot in her life.

She has built a following of 38,000 on Instagram from a Scottsdale base, and the content is consistently grounded in movement — real movement, not posed stillness. Flows, transitions, weight shifts, the kind of practice that shows you what a body actually does. And what Bentley Fazi's feet actually do, in that context, is hold. High arch, sustained under load, session after session. That's not nothing. That's a structural fact worth paying attention to.