[1] Bartenieff incorporated Laban's spatial concepts into the mechanical anatomical activity of physical therapy, in order to enhance maximal functioning.

A Renaissance woman who enjoyed weaving disciplines together, she was always ready to investigate movement in a variety of fields—including child development, ethnic dances, nonverbal communication and physical rehabilitation.

She and her second husband, who were Jewish, had a thriving dance company, but their dancers, threatened by the Nazis with expulsion from the union, were forced to resign.

Her first appointment in the United States was as Chief Physical Therapist for the Polio Service of New York City at Willard Parker Hospital.

As Bartenieff observed her first polio patients she became intensely aware of their individuality in coping with the sudden loss of function and changes in self-image.

I had to stimulate their natural action potential... innate curiosity, a desire to change, the discovery of alternate ways of functioning, relating to others, taking initiative, resisting, asserting—all in both physical and emotional modes—and especially, enjoying play.

"[2] This work led to developmental studies on newborns and infants at Long Island Jewish Hospital in collaboration with Dr. Judith Kestenberg.

In this setting she learned connective tissue massage[5] and continued her work with a whole-body focus: "We tried to replace wherever possible—and that means medically feasible—the conventional type of localized exercise by total movement patterns based on dance fundamentals.

Back in New York, she applied these ideas in her own physical therapy practice and set up training programs for dance therapists and other movement professionals.

She held a position of dance therapy research assistant (1957–1967)[8] to Dr. Israel Zwerling at the Day Hospital Unit of Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

[9] In her sixty-fifth year Bartenieff established the first North American training program in Laban-based movement theory at the Dance Notation Bureau.

Students learned a means of observing and describing the qualitative and spatial aspects of movement which Laban and his colleagues in England had been using in various applications since the 1940s.

In her own teaching, however, Bartenieff found her students lacking the whole body integration, or “connectedness” as she called it, necessary to fully experience the range of Effort qualities.

The founding board of directors created LIMS specifically as a place where Bartenieff, then in her seventy-eighth year, could continue her research, writing and teaching.

“Up to the last six months of her life, when she became ill, Bartenieff maintained a private physical therapy practice and lectured and taught around the country.