Presenter: Bonnie Bernstein
Presentation: Arts-Empowerment-Activism: Healing Psychosocial Trauma in Kolkata, India
Room: Mariposa
Presentation Description:
The expressive arts provide unique resources for social activism and healing trauma in the global community. Creative expression can become songs of empowerment, dances of courage, paintings of inner strengths, dramatic transformation of memories and rehearsals for generating change in life circumstances. This experiential and didactic workshop will introduce an empowerment-focused expressive arts approach I have developed since 2008 through yearly month-long workshops designed for sex trafficking survivors in Kolkata, India. Through experiential exercises and discussion participants will discover clinical interventions that are applicable to working with psychosocial trauma while strengthening their personal creative process for working with vulnerable populations.