Lesley PhD student Madoka Urhausen (far right) led a panel with Florida State University peers Danielle Chen and Cui Jin at the American Art Therapy Association Conference
Lesley students and alumni recently attended the 53rd annual American Art Therapy Association Conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where two members of the community were recognized for their scholarship.
Expressive Therapies alumna Dr. Sojung Park ’16 and current PhD student Madoka Urhausen both took home awards.
Park received the Best Paper Award for her work "Traditional Korean Art Materials as Therapeutic Media: Multicultural Expansion Through Materials in Art Therapy.” This was her second award from the association. In 2020, Park received the Pearlie Roberson Award for her research proposal of a qualitative pilot study on the experiences of international students in South Korea in an intercultural art therapy program.
This year, Urhausen received that same award, named for Roberson, an African American artist and art therapy client. The honor is designed to recognize students and researchers who “explore, express, connect” the multicultural aspects of the therapeutic experience.
Madoka Urhausen receives the Pearlie Roberson Award. Photo courtesy: Marie Deschamps, Lesley PhD student
Urhausen, a fourth-year Expressive Therapies PhD student at Lesley, received the award for her paper “Experiences of Post-Masters Arts Based Supervision with Art Therapists of Color.”
Urshausen participated in a related panel, “Doctoral Students of Color: Perspectives on Intersectionality and Observations in Academia,” alongside fellow PhD candidates Danielle Chen and Cui Jin of Florida State University.
The panel came about through discussions in the association’s Doctoral Education Subcommittee about the challenges of both rigorous academic work and being part of a marginalized identity and the biases, embedded hierarchies and power dynamics that exist in the university infrastructure.
Through the panel, Urshausen and Chen highlighted their perspectives as art therapy and expressive therapy students with intersectional identities, along with the effects that current events have had on people of color.