Laura Smith-Centeno

Laura’s work lives at the intersection of expressive arts therapy, creative youth development, and community-rooted healing. For more than fifteen years, she has collaborated with young people, schools, and communities using creativity as a pathway for connection, dialogue, and transformation. Her practice draws on mural-making, peacemaking pedagogies, spontaneous play, art therapy, and other expressive modalities that help people regulate, express, imagine, and heal, both individually and collectively.

Laura’s journey with Raw Art Works (RAW) began in 2011 as a visiting artist and then as an expressive arts therapist. Today she serves as the organization’s Senior Creative Director. Over the years, she has helped bring RAW’s model into Lynn Public Schools, facilitated art therapy groups, and supported youth employment and community partnerships. Her understanding of this work has also been shaped by cross-cultural collaborations, including with Voces Arts and Healing on the U.S.–Mexico Border, with The Creative Action Institute in El Salvador, and through her Fulbright research in Medellín, Colombia with Pirañas Crew. These experiences deepened her belief that art is a universal language capable of confronting harm, restoring agency, and transforming public space into a site of healing.

Across all of her work, Laura is guided by the question: What becomes possible when we create together? She strives to cultivate spaces where imagination expands, community strengthens, and healing can take root across borders, identities, and experiences.