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Professor Vivien Speiser

Professor Emerita at Institute for Arts and Health, Lesley University
Haymarket, VA, United States

Vivien Speiser, Ph.D., LMHC, BC-DMT, REAT, is a Professor Emerita in Dance and Expressive therapy and Co-Director of the Institute of Arts and Health at Lesley University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. In addition she is a Distinguished Research Associate at the University of the Witwatersrand and teaches in the Art Therapy Program at the University of Johannesburg. She has directed and taught in programmes across the United States and internationally, and has used the arts as a way of learning, communicating across borders and across cultures. Prof. Speiser is a licensed mental health counselor, a dance/movment therapist and an expressive arts therapist and educator. She has developed and implemented numerous arts based programs throughout the USA and Israel. As former founder and director of the Arts Institute Project in Israel, she is a Professor at ONO academic Collage, and she has been influential in the development of Expressive Arts Therapy in that country. She is currently in the credentialing committee of IACAET, The International Association of Creative Arts in Education and Therapy and is a co-editor of the CAET journal. Her contributions to the field have made her an international leader in dance and expressive therapy, and earned her the 2014 Distinguished Fellows Award from the Global Alliance for Arts and Health and a 2015 Honorary Fellow Lifetime Achievement award from the Israeli Expressive and Creative Arts Therapy
Association (ICET). In addition she has received a 2019 JAAH Lifetime Achievement Award in Applied Arts and Health, and is a 2020 and 2023 recipient of a Fulbright Senior Scholar Award to the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa as well as a Fulbright Specialist award to Zambia in 2024.

Interests

Prof. Speiser has taught throughout the world and believes in the use of the arts as a way of communicating across borders and across cultures. She believes in the power of the arts to create the conditions for personal and social change and
transformation. Her interests and expertise lie in the areas of working with communities under duress through an integrated arts approach. Many of her publications are grounded in her work with trauma and cross-cultural conflict resolution through the arts. In addition, she is an expert in the creation and performance of 'rites of passage rituals' and in the use of
performance in expressive therapy practice. Her current interests are in generating international and local community training and global research partnerships . She is a co-editor of The Arts, Education and Social Change: Little Signs of Hope, published by Peter Lang. She is also a co-author of The Arts and Social Change: The Lesley University Experience in Israel. In Israel she has organized such events as: The Imagine Conference: An Arts Approach to Working with Conflict, which brought together Palestinians and Israelis to envision a healed future, Tel Aviv April 2006. She is the author of many articles and books addressing trauma such as An Arts Approach to Working with Cross Cultural Conflicts, The Journal of Humanistic Psychology; The Use of the Arts in Working with Fear and Stress, The Art of Healthcare, Volume 3:13