Karin Mellberg
I’m a women’s health advocate, Duke-certified Health & Wellbeing Coach, and creator of Graphic Redress, a visual healing arts practice drawing care into the women’s health gap, and inviting collective redress of the trauma built into it across centuries. Graphic Redress is visual alchemy - a visual restoration of women’s healing authority across three bodies: historical, ancestral, and personal.
For decades, I’ve worked, collaborated and advocated at the intersection of arts and health. I am a change partner, certified Duke Health & Wellbeing Coach and creator of Graphic Redress - a practice of visual alchemy that asks…WHAT IF…we could draw care into the Women’s Health Gap? I welcome new connections, learning, and growing and sharing as a healing arts practitioner through engagement with the innovative neuroarts community.
MY HEALTH & WELLBEING: A PERSONAL CREATIVE ACT
Daily, I draw upon arts and aesthetic experiences to realize my own health and wellbeing. Required to personally navigate knowledge gaps and care disparities common to autoimmune diseases that disproportionately affect women, I turned to expanded ways of knowing and affecting wellbeing. The arts, an early childhood love (drawing, music), became a life line. Over the last 30 years, I’ve also immersed myself in the formal study of other systems of knowing - including mindfulness-based stress reduction, energy medicine/Reiki, Tibetan Buddhist compassion-based psychology (including formal Tibetan arts training), and nature-based shamanism. I am a beneficiary and champion of the neuroscience of change, and emerging field of NeuroArts. Both helping to expand ways of knowing health, self, and other.
ARTS + MENTAL WELLBEING PROJECT
In response to COVID-19 school disruptions, I partnered with my sister, Carol Mellberg, MA, LMFT, ATR, to develop and deliver our arts-based BackTogether!™ program to 6,000 students. This innovative mental health prevention program brought arts-based SEL skills building, joy and re-connection to students kindergarten through high school. BackTogether™ was selected for the International Medical Humanities Conference, Amsterdam, 2022. I’ve also created and delivered healing arts programs to women navigating lupus.
STORYTELLING
I better understand myself and the world through story - creating stories, written and visual, and creating opportunities for communities to share their own. I led national health advocacy campaigns as an award-winning documentary storyteller: Stories of Lupus, WNET-PBS distributed, Time Inc. International Health & Medical Film Competition Award; and Final Pose, A Practice In Dying, Bend Film Festival Award. Graphic Redress, that debuted at the Graphic Medicine Europe Conference in September 2026, continues this arc - a graphic medicine memoir and now a collective practice at the intersection of women's health, advocacy and the arts.
CORPORATE CHANGE PARTNER
My business career has always involved change making and creativity - starting with my first job in the field of Continuous Quality Improvement. I’ve led change management, market development, leadership communications, and employee engagement programs for technology and biotech companies in Silicon Valley. I hold degrees from UCLA, and an MBA from Santa Clara University.