[Self-Study] Aspiring for the Future of Technology in Art Therapy

Erin Partridge, PhD, ATR-BC is an artist and board certified, registered art therapist. Her clinical experience includes work in community, pediatric, forensic, and geriatric settings. Erin received a BFA, studying fine art, psychology and women’s studies in at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. She went onto obtain a MA in art therapy from New York University in 2008, and a PhD in art therapy from Notre Dame de Namur in 2016. Erin’s teaching and lecturing experience includes teaching at NDNU in the art therapy department, guest lectures in art and counseling programs, mentoring undergraduate and graduate students, workshop facilitation at several national conferences, and interviews with media about art therapy.

Her research interests incorporate the lived experience and focus on participatory, ethnographic, and art-based approaches. She is currently working on responding to the findings of her research within the elder care context, and conducting continued research in this setting.

Originally from Europe (France/Germany) but based in Houston (TX, USA), Marie Deschamps (she, her), PhDc, is an art psychotherapist, researcher, and artist, with a clinical specialty in psycho-oncology and palliative care (UNAM, Mexico). A current doctoral candidate at Lesley University (Cambridge, USA), her research focuses on enhancing self-disclosure of oncological symptoms in collaboration with MD Anderson Cancer Center (TX, USA). A graduate of the MIT-Harvard Medical School innovation in healthcare bootcamp, she has been developing a software to integrate art-based expression in health data monitoring and collaborates with the SexTech lab at the New School University (NY, USA) on researching the use of AI generative art in fostering therapeutic attunement. For the past two years, she has been teaching future art psychotherapists from Central and South America at the Instituto Mexicano de Psicoterapia de Arte (IMPA). She is a mother to Emilio and Matteo.

For her day job, Ruchi Mehta heads Product Design for India’s largest online ticketing portal. In her personal capacity, she is a single mother, who likes to dabble in different mediums to give voice to her creative side. From weaving to shibori, painting to sketching, lino cuts to ceramics, she has a deep interest in physical materials. More recently though, her explorations have led her to use software like Procreate and Figma to produce artwork. She recalls a solitary childhood, painfully shy and reticent, a little girl who used art to deal with the overwhelming world around her. As an adult, whenever life threw her some curveballs, she used it to catalyse more creative work. With the advent of generative art using AI, she has found a new way to express her inner life.

Nancy Choe (PhD, LMFT, ATR-BC) has a special interest in employing an interdisciplinary approach to promote holistic and creativity-driven wellness. Her research endeavors in art therapy have centered on digital media and technology, narrative medicine, the expressive therapies continuum (ETC), and post-traumatic creativity. Based in Los Angeles, Nancy maintains a private practice, teaches art therapy graduate courses, and conducts exploratory arts-based research.