• 9:30AM-3:00PM. |  Free to attend ($35 for 3 CE credits) | University Hall - Roski | Lunch and Refreshments included

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13th Annual Art Therapy Research Symposium

Theme: Cultural Appropriation: Issues in Art Therapy Research, Practice, and the Arts

The 13th Annual Art Therapy Research Symposium examines cultural appropriation, appreciation, and ethical engagement in art therapy research, clinical practice, and the arts. This year’s symposium brings together interdisciplinary perspectives to explore how cultural knowledge is created, sustained, interpreted, and, at times, misrepresented across contexts.

The symposium foregrounds inquiry-driven, reflexive, and community-engaged research approaches, emphasizing how cultural knowledge is shared across generations, shaping its understanding and application in practice.  Participants will engage with guiding questions such as: How do we design research that honors cultural heritage? Whose knowledge is centered, and how is it interpreted? What ethical responsibilities do researchers, artists, and practitioners hold in relation to the communities they engage? Through this lens, inquiry is framed as a relational and ethically grounded process across clinical, artistic, scholarly, and community-based contexts.

The symposium features interactive presentations with featured guest scholars:

Tara Gujadhur – Tradition, Transmission, and Belonging: Ethnic Minority Craft in a Global Context.  This session explores how craft knowledge is learned, practiced, and socially anchored across generations in ethnic minority and Indigenous communities, with the Oma of Laos as a central case study within a wider global context. The talk considers how traditional techniques and motifs circulate beyond their original settings, distinguishing meaningful cultural exchange from misappropriation and extractive reuse in design, education, and therapeutic environments.

Amy Díaz-Infante Siqueiros - Surfacing Ancestral Knowledge and Identity through Narrative Art.  This artist presentation will feature narrative artwork that documents the Chicana experience. Themes here include migration, liminality, respectability politics, magical realism, separation, and reciprocity. This talk will explore how both the content and the practice of art making serves as a method for connecting to self, the body, and community.

And faculty panelists:

Melody Rod-ari, whose art historical and museum-based research examines Buddhist visual culture in Southeast Asia alongside the histories of collecting, display, and repatriation of Asian art, raising critical questions about ownership, representation, and cultural sovereignty in institutional contexts. 

Wilfried Souly, a choreographer, performer, educator, and cultural producer originally from Burkina Faso and based in Los Angeles. His work merges West African/Mandé traditional dance, contemporary movement, and martial arts to investigate themes of identity, migration, resilience, and social justice.

Divine Kwasi Gbagbo, whose specialized focus in Ethnomusicology and Musicology examines the understudied relationship between Christianity and Ghanaian Ewe musical practices.  His work explores the intersection between music, dance and spirituality and how traditional music blends within the contemporary global narrative.

Together, these perspectives invite participants to examine how art therapy and the arts intersect with global histories of cultural exchange, displacement, and power, and to develop more ethically grounded, reflexive, and culturally responsive approaches to both research and practice.

INTENDED AUDIENCE

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

Notice of Filming and Photography

When you attend this event, you enter an area where photography, audio, and video recording may occur on behalf of Loyola Marymount University. By entering the event premises, you consent to such recording media and its release, publication, exhibition, or reproduction in any medium or format whatsoever now existing or hereafter created.

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