We are filled with gratitude for this
abundant and generous expressive arts community! Between August and December, our community has been guided on a journey of Expressive Arts practices around the world. Many of you have joined us, and we have shared, learned, and visioned together. Our 2020 Professional Development workshop series has now come to completion, and we offer deep thanks to these amazing guides and teachers.
Through the presentations we visited India, Portland, Edmonton, rural Ontario, Kenya, Nepal, Boston, Mexico, Cuba, Atlanta, California, the Mexico-USA border, and Hong Kong.
We embraced the languages of dance theater, visual art, rhythm, movement, music, clay, video, traditional indigenous and popular art practices, breath, natural materials, digital technology, and the elements.
We engaged our inner dancer and inner choreographer as we experienced letting go in a way that felt both safe and playful. We learned about the power of expressive arts to meet poverty, human trafficking and incarceration. We explored the connection between self-compassion and resilience, and we discovered innovative ways to adapt, through the arts, to an online format, even while working with people in
isolation.
Learning more about attunement, we engaged the power of rhythm, movement, and the elements to address living with uncertainty and collective trauma. We asked ourselves the question "what are my own cultural practices?" as we discovered some of the traditional arts practices of Mexico and their connection to
expressive arts.
Through the guiding principles of Person-Centered Expressive Arts, we explored melting and growing in movement and visual art. We embodied an element, and invited it to illuminate that which we are mourning, and to teach us about what is true and essential about ourselves.
Our EAFI 220 (Expressive Arts in the World) students tracked their rich and deep journeys on their maps, which they added to after each presentation. These maps, which you see examples of here, are their visual art containers for the whole 4-month journey.
Visual art allows us the opportunity to reflect and look at the whole, as well as to remember the essential nuggets of learning that stay with us.
The powerful artworks here are some examples of the students' maps. In order of presentation: Julie Collura, Jessica Logreira, Renee Bhatia, Jo Ann Dellaposta, and Brandy Schafer (Mentor). We thank these artists for sharing their work, and we thank all of our certificate students for their presence and willingness to show up so fully fo each experience.
We are currently planning our 2021 Professional Development series. We hope that all of these presenters will return, and we have at least six more on the schedule. The new schedule will be published at the end of this month.
We hope you will join us for some or all of these training workshops.
Professional Development workshops are designed to provide you with resources to deepen and broaden your expressive arts training, knowledge, and experience. We are committed to bringing you a diverse selection of teacher/facilitators who are guiding and shaping our field.
Watch for the 2021 schedule!
In creative community,
Expressive Arts Florida Team
Faculty:
- Kathleen Horne, MA, LMHC, REACE, REAT
- Tamara Teeter Knapp, MA, MHC Intern, K-12 Art, REACE
- Victoria Domenichello-Anderson, MA, REACE
Graduate Mentors:
- Theresa Foster, PhD
- Brandy Schafer, MA, LMHC, REAT
- Susan Paul Johnson, PhD
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