Join us for AATA2026

Oct. 14 – 17, 2026

Charlotte, NC

The Frequency of Space: Impacts of Our Immediate Environment on our Psychology

In art therapy, the construction and attunement of the therapeutic container is an essential component of our profession. By incorporating a modality that aims to physically and conceptually construct therapeutic spaces, the result could provide clients with the means to alter their own personal spaces into ones that directly address and ease their psychological symptoms.

Presenters: Laura Cuille

Collage, Self-Esteem, and Identity in the Menopausal Transition

Perimenopause and menopause are significant developmental transitions impacting identity, mood, and well-being, often accompanied by stigma and limited support. Creative arts therapy offers an embodied, relational approach to processing
these changes. This workshop presents a structured collage-based group intervention from a mixed-methods thesis, highlighting facilitation strategies, evaluation methods, and ethical considerations to support self-esteem, coping, and community connection.

Presenters: Meryl Cooper

Threads of Wellness: Exploring Adlerian Five Life Tasks Through Slow Stitching

Create a Wellness Wheel through slow stitching and textiles while identifying life imbalances that offer opportunities to foster change in wellness outcomes. Moving from felt minus to felt plus, participants build community through shared reflection, intersectional dialogue, and goal setting that increases social interest, belonging, and community feeling, and supports mindful nervous system regulation through slow, repetitive textile processes.

Presenters: Jennifer Kotecki and Tomeka McGee-Holloway

Making Your Mark: The Innate Need to Create

This workshop explores the idea that creativity is a natural ability all people possess, not a gift some are born with, but an essential, healing, and unifying thread within the fabric of humanity. We will explore the history of “making a mark” from Neanderthals to modern art and contemporary graffiti. reframing creativity as a shared birthright rather than selective privilege.

Presenters: Robin Shahverdian

The Pale Blue Dot: Witnessing Presence and Collective Constellations through Cyanotype

This experiential workshop explores the concepts of presence and responsibility, inspired by Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot. Participants engage in a collective cyanotype print-making, transforming individual reflections into a shared visual constellation. This process invites therapists to witness traces of existence and foster community through collaborative art-making.

Presenters: Yunkyung Lee and SaeJin Lee

Community as Material: Collective Art making as Art Therapy, Method, and Activism

This presentation combines demonstration and dialogue to explore collective art-making as art therapy, methodology, and activism. Participants will learn how to create Dolls4Peace figures while engaging projects including community quilts and grief textiles. Individual pieces are assembled into shared works, positioning community as material and transforming personal narratives into collective archives for visibility, care, and social change.

Presenters: Rochele Royster

The Peace Flag Project: A Community Space for Healing

In this interactive workshop, learn about Public Practice Art Therapy—also known as Art Hives—Explore its history, real-life applications, and the inspiring Peace Flag Project based North Carolina’s Triangle area. Then get hands-on: create your own Peace Flag and, if you wish, contribute it to this growing community art initiative.

Presenters: Bridget Pemberton-Smith

Cultural Humility & Anti-Oppressive Supervision

This experiential training explores cultural humility and anti-oppressive practices in clinical supervision for art therapists and counselors. Participants examine power, identity, and cultural countertransference through art-based reflection, case discussion, and applied supervisory strategies. Emphasis is placed on broaching cultural dynamics, repairing ruptures, and
fostering culturally responsive supervision that supports supervisee development and equitable client care.

Presenters: Mary Ellen Ruff and Jennifer Baldwin

When Creativity Isn’t Enough: Burnout Among Black Therapists

When is creativity restorative and when is it compensatory? This session presents quantitative research on burnout among Black therapists and challenges assumptions that artmaking alone prevents exhaustion. Participants will explore
systemic contributors to burnout and engage in a structured art-based reflection to assess creative sustainability within clinical, supervisory, and training contexts.

Presenters: Tanadja Barber

[Professional Practice] Exploring Sexuality, Non-Monogamy and A-Typical Relationships

While there may be one way to do monogamy, there are thousands of ways to practice consensual non-monogamy. This workshop provides an in-depth overview of the various styles of CNM relationships and offers creative tools and insights
necessary to sensitively assist clients in complex relational landscapes.

Presenters: Pamela Malkoff

[Professional Practice] Sacred Imagination: An Embodied Framework for Spiritual Meaning-Making in Art Therapy

This experiential workshop introduces the Sacred Imagination Model, integrating embodiment, art-making, and spiritual meaning-making. Participants will engage in grounding practices and a guided art directive while learning practical, ethically grounded approaches for integrating spirituality into art therapy and educational settings.

Presenters: Joselyn Spence

[Professional Practice] Using Arts Therapy to Enhance Salutogenic Coping with Long-Term Social Stress

This interactive workshop presents how arts-based methods can strengthen salutogenic coping with long-term social stress. Drawing on the concept of Sense of Coherence (manageability, comprehensibility, and meaningfulness), it shows how shared-reality art groups foster solidarity, de-pathologize stress, and position participants as co-experts. Three case studies and structured arts-based methods will be used to demonstrate practical approaches for addressing social stress.

Presenters: Ephrat Huss, Tami Gavron, and Michal Bat-Or

[Professional Practice] Where Image Meets Movement: Exploring Interdisciplinary Collaboration Between Art and Dance/Movement Therapy

What happens when art therapy and dance/movement therapy work together — not side by side, but in genuine creative dialogue? Developed in a forensic psychiatric inpatient setting, this workshop guides clinicians through an integrated directive and a practical framework for interdisciplinary collaboration between the two disciplines.

Presenters: Alfred Lee and Hannah Whitley

[Professional Practice] Response Art of Response Art: Peer Model for Clinician Grief Processing

Art therapists in high-acuity environments often encounter patient death and trauma narratives with intense loss and uncertainty, yet lack structured ways for processing within clinical teams. This experiential workshop teaches the use of a two-stage response art protocol that may provide a novel way to support clinician grief and professional isolation.

Presenters: Queenie Wong and Alfred Lee

[Professional Practice] Seeing With Every Sense: Using Body-Mind-Spirit When Viewing Artwork

Seeing With Every Sense: Using Body-Mind-Spirit When Viewing Artworks is a 90-minute workshop in which participants will be viewing and responding in multiple ways to visual images for the purpose of heightening their sensitivity to using all of the sensory resources available to them in viewing and processing artwork created by their art therapy clients.

Presenters: Barbara Robertson

[Professional Practice] Recuperation Comics: Graphic Medicine to Navigate Burnout and Recovery for Art Therapists

This workshop will use comic creation to support participants in navigating burnout in their therapy practice, adding to the intersection between graphic medicine and art therapy. This workshop will provide an overview of graphic medicine, followed by two comic-making activities to support participants in exploring their experience of burnout and understanding what their recovery process looks like.

Presenters: Christine Phang and Erin Partridge

[Trauma] Trauma-Informed Hospitality and Community Engagement Through Art Therapy

This experiential workshop examines trauma-informed art therapy approaches to community engagement in crisis and disaster response settings. Participants will identify core trauma-informed principles guiding community art interventions,
explore strategies for engaging participants in safe creative processes, and examine how integrating individual artmaking within collective community art experiences can strengthen connection, resilience, and shared meaning-making.

Presenters: Susan Kappel

[Children/Adolescents] Listening to Fathers Unheard Voices: Group Parent-Child Art Psychotherapy involving Woodworking

This workshop will explore fathers’ experiences during Group Parent-Child Art Psychotherapy involving woodworking. After a brief qualitative research presentation, the participants will engage in hands-on woodworking in pairs, followed by a reflective group dialogue. The participants will discover how working with wood, a tangible, “living” material, can strengthen connections, elicit dynamics of pride, effort, and support fathers’ emotional engagement.

Presenters: Shira Meshulam Heskia and Noga Saranga Rockowitz

[Medical Settings] Therapeutic Containment in Medical Art Therapy

This workshop explores how therapeutic containment functions in medical art therapy to support patients experiencing vulnerability, loss of control, and uncertainty. Through a prompt involving symbolic enclosure, participants will
examine how safety, boundaries, and projection can be facilitated at a tolerable distance. Discussion will address trauma-informed considerations, pediatric oncology context, and clinical relevance for creative arts therapists in medical
environments.

Presenters: Callie Barker

[Psychiatric Settings] Interpreting Patient Artwork and Therapeutic Process: A Relational Psychoanalytic Clinical Approach

Discover how a relational psychoanalytic lens can deepen the way art therapists understand patient artwork and therapeutic process. Through clinical examples and experiential reflection, participants will explore how defenses, transference, and relational dynamics emerge in imagery and interaction, and how psychoanalytic interventions can support meaningful interpretation and therapeutic engagement in art therapy practice.

Presenters: Brandon Colle

[School Setting] When Time Is Limited: An Experiential School-Based Art Therapy Workshop

This experiential workshop introduces the Time-Limited School-Based Art Therapy (TLSB-AT) model. Through hands-on art-making and group reflection, the attendees will explore how temporal boundaries shape clinical practice. The session will
cover formulating the central issue- the therapeutic focus – and structuring parental involvement, thus turning the external constraints of the academic calendar into a vital clinical resource.

Presenters: Shira Meshulam Heskia, Rotem Abraham, and Dafna Regev

[School Setting] Roses in December: Navigating Bereavement with Adolescents in the School Setting

When bereavement becomes a part of one’s adolescent life, distinct difficulties emerge. This workshop will explore how art therapy can support navigating these complex clinical encounters with adolescents. It will underline how integrative
art therapy programming in schools provides unique opportunities to meet traumatic losses. Workshop includes an art experiential using paint, natural materials, and resin-pouring to deepen learning.

Presenters: Amanda Smith

[School Setting] The Third Language Workshop: Integrating Arts Therapists Into Multidisciplinary School Teams

Engage in this immersive workshop to gain fresh perspectives on the art therapist’s role within educational teams. Through a hands-on art experiential, participants bridge personal reflection with professional practice to refine their understanding of their own collaborative partnerships. This interactive session integrates shared experiences with a research-based model, offering practical tools to navigate and strengthen multidisciplinary school-based work.

Presenters: Liat Cohen-Yatziv and Dafna Regev

Beyond the Snapshot: Exploring Photography as an Expressive Medium in Art Therapy

Photography is one of the most accessible art forms today yet its expressive possibilities are often overlooked. Led by an internationally recognized fine art photographer with art therapy training this experiential workshop invites participants to use their phones to explore photography in new ways. Through guided image-making, attendees will discover intentional and creative ways to use photography with clients.

Participants should bring a smartphone with a camera.

Presenters: Carly Sullens

Digital Art Therapy: Expanding Expression for Clients with Disabilities

This workshop will explore digital art therapy with clients with physical disabilities. Based on qualitative research with art therapists working with AAC users, the participants will have the opportunity for hands-on experimentation with the accessibility, independence, and expansion of expression of these digital art techniques, and will come away with practical skills for integrating these tools into their practice. The presenters will bring iPads or tablets, but please be sure to bring a mobile device with you to this session.

Presenters: Noga Saranga Rockowitz and Shira Meshulam Heskia

License to Explore: Playing the Expanded Field with Expressive Arts and Technology

License to Explore: Playing in the Expanded Field with Expressive Arts and Technological Innovation invites participants into a 90-minute experiential workshop exploring how art therapists can expand their creative palette through multimodal expression and emerging technologies. Through brief clinical insights, playful creative exercises, and collaborative reflection, participants will experiment with new ways to deepen therapeutic attunement and stimulate clinical innovation.

Presenters: Marie Deschamps and Krystal Demaine