Gillian Grassie is an award-winning writer, musician, coach based in LA and deeply besotted dog mom to her pitbull rescue, Liadain.Her life’s work has taken a few wonderfully winding roads: traveling the world with a harp on her back, writing songs and screenplays, ghostwriting memoirs, facilitating groups, and exploring the strange, beautiful business of being a human in relationship with other humans.
And then, of course, there are dogs.
We met Gillian through Liadain and quickly realized that the way Gillian thinks about relationship, embodiment, truth, connection, boundaries, and presence belongs squarely inside a conversation about Dog Culture.
Because dogs have an uncanny way of bringing all of that right to the surface.
They notice what we’re carrying before we’ve named it. They respond to what we do, not necessarily what we think we’re doing. They ask us to become clearer without becoming harder, softer without disappearing, and present enough to actually notice the being standing in front of us.
Gillian’s work lives in that relational territory: the space between two beings, where communication is happening long before anyone has found the right words.
We’re bringing her to Dog Culture not as a “dog expert,” but as something we think is equally valuable: a thoughtful, curious dog person whose work with human connection gives us another lens through which to look at the extraordinary relationships we build with dogs.

The dog knows with Gillian Grassie