Dr. Shanee Stepakoff, PhD, MFA in conversation with EXA Program Chair, Shoshana Simons, will discuss her personal experience of using expressive arts therapy with people surviving the immediate and long-term effects of forced migration, displacement and torture. The conversation will also explore issues related to working in cross-cultural contexts across the boundaries of national, race, class and gender power dynamics.

Dr. Stepakoff will then present on how she has used expressive arts therapy approaches combined with mainstream psychotherapy and indigenous healing in two refugee mental health programs: one serving Liberians and Sierra Leoneans in remote refugee camps in Guinea, the other serving Iraqis in an urban clinic in Jordan.