Transformative Arts Practice

Artistic activities, including dance and drama, music and writing, painting and sculpting, have an innate capacity to facilitate change. Such change may be cognitive, emotional, and behavioral on the level of individual participation. And artistic activity provides an opportunity for self-reflection by which non-logical characteristics of experience find expression through imagery and metaphor, association and allusion. Pursuit of the arts also precipitates change at the social and cultural level of community engagement. And pursuit of expressive creativity often provides the means by which people with diverse beliefs and attitudes transcend differences in service of transcendent commonality and communion. The Transformative Arts Project investigates the way in which creative process and artistic practice can facilitate such positive psychological and social change.