Healing Arts: Cultivating Resilience and Resistance

A gathering to share healing justice practices which feed our resilience and resistance.

Friday, April 20, noon-5 PM
Arts and Letters Room 412.

All are welcome to come to one, two, or all of the presentations/workshops. They are all interactive and all are offered by amazing women artists, writers, performers, healers, scholars. Following the schedule below is more information about each of the workshop presenters.

12:00-1:45
My Body’s Narratives and The Narratives of My Body
a writing workshop with Dorothy Bell Ferrer

An interactive writing workshop about the elements of personal narrative from an Afro-Caribbean perspective which encourages participants to take charge of their voices and discover their personal narrative as a measure of resistance to capitalism and colonialism.

2:00-3:30
A Full Circle: Storytelling Art for Resistance & Healing
a talk and performance with Ada Cheng

In this workshop, Ada Cheng will weave personal stories with reflections on the art of storytelling. She will demonstrate how, through examples of the stories she has told, storytelling can be used as a tool for resistance as well as that for healing from trauma. In the last part of the workshop, participants will collectively explore how they can integrate storytelling into their respective work for effective engagement.

3:45-5:00
Opening the Heart Ceremony
a workshop with Misty DeBerry

This workshop seeks to create a space where participants can explore and practice ideas of closure, passing on, and transitioning out of the activities from the day. Through gentle embodiment, reiki based visualization, and collective collaging, we will ask ourselves what does it mean and/or feel like to engage in shared modes of healing?

Workshop Facilitators:

Dorothy Bell Ferrer – https://insurgentprieta.wordpress.com/

Ada Cheng  – http://www.renegadeadacheng.com/

Misty DeBerry – Misty De Berry is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Performance Studies at Northwestern University. There her scholarship sits at the intersection of performance studies, Black Feminist Thought, Marxist theory, and art history. Currently she is at work on her dissertation, which examines modes of debt and temporality in the lives of Black women. Ultimately concerned with embodied aesthetics as strategies for interrupting harm in the lives Black women, her scholarship is deeply informed by her work as a performance artist, playwright, and master reiki practitioner.