Congratulations to the 2023-2024 graduates!
Maria Andreeva
Danielle Courneya
Alisha D’Souza
Christy Doran
Rae Doust
On Yee Ip
Paige Krossing
Madeline Lass
Natasha Nadia Matar
Shara McLaren
Maria Rodriguez
Emily Serhal
Jordan Sullivan
Kim Swartz
Sarah Waterfield
Katie White
Jessica Wong
Chia-Hua Emily Yang
Annual Research Awards
Gilda Grossman Award
Recognizes contributions to social action and transformation through art therapy.
Natasha Nadia Matar
An Art-based Auto-ethnography of Unforgetting the Palestinian Genocide
Presented by Anand Jaggernauth, TATI instructor and Treasurer of the Canadian Art Therapy Association.
Dr. Martin Fischer Award
Recognizes contributions to art therapy knowledge and theory. This year the award is shared by:
Alex Nicholls
Group Art Therapy with Tabletop Role-Playing Games (TTRPGs) for Decreasing Social Anxiety in Young Adults
Leanna Scheitrowsky
Research-Creation Exploring Dungeons and Dragons as a Therapeutic Tool in Art Therapy
Presented by Dr. Olena Darewych, TATI research advisor.
Guest Speaker: Dr. Elene Lam
Elene is an activist, artist, community organizer, educator, author, and human rights defender. She has fought for sex worker, migrant, gender, labor, and racial justice for over twenty years. She is the founder of Butterfly: Asian and Migrant Sex Worker Support Network and the co-founder of Migrant Sex Workers Project. She has used diverse and innovative approaches to advocacy, including collective arts-making. She holds a master of law, a master of social work, and a PhD in social work, and is an assistant professor in the Critical Disability Studies Program in the Faculty of Health at York University. She was awarded the Constance E. Hamilton Award for Women’s Equality by the City of Toronto. She is the co-author of Not Your Rescue Project: Migrant Sex Workers Fighting for Justice.
Elene shared an inspiring message about the power of arts-making for individual and collective empowerment as well as community building and mobilization. She recounted her collaborations with art therapists and students over the years, including guest speaking in TATI classrooms and hosting practicum students at her organization, and praised the graduates’ contributions to community well-being. She encouraged art therapists to continue building capacity to consider broader social contexts and systems of oppression in their understanding and practices of therapy and support.
As TATI Executive Director Dr. Patricia Ki also shared,
“bell hooks writes that the purpose of the arts is not just to tell it like it is – it is to imagine what is possible. Imagination is the heart of art therapy. It is the radical roots of our work. Angela Davis defines radical as “grasping at the roots” – or a returning to the roots of what’s important – your work as students and now graduates, your projects, your creativity and imagination, your advocacy, your critical thinking and analysis, the connections you built, the support you offered into communities, teach me over and over again the infinite ways of returning to our roots and our values, of creating alternatives that are beyond my own imagination, toward a better future. […] Dr. Helene Burt once told me that what we do is important, sometimes it doesn’t feel like it, but it is. And we have to believe it. Because the struggle of our shared timeplace today is a struggle of the imagination. Because in order to build a different world we must first be able to imagine it.”
Much gratitude to those who made this event possible:
MC: Dave Cho
Photography: Jesse Pajuäär
Independent Award Adjudicator: Dr. Mary Norton
Event organizing: Amina Abbas, Kristina Borg, Dave Cho, Jacquie Compton, Olena Darewych, Anand Jaggernauth, Patricia Ki, Jesse Pajuäär, Michael Young
Special thanks to the TATI Board of Directors, and Debbie Anderson (chair of the board), Bob Engel (Treasurer), and Belinda Ageda (Director) for joining us in celebration!
Much appreciation for Women’s Art Association of Canada for the artful venue and hospitality, as always.
More photos from the celebration:
