The Department of Art Education and the Graduate Art Therapy program welcomes Dr. Nancy Gerber to Florida State University and the city of Tallahassee. The Art Therapy program integrates diverse theories and research-informed practices to foster culturally sensitive graduates who understand and apply the power of the visual arts and therapeutic relationships to promote personal and community wellness.
Dr. Nancy Gerber has an extensive repertoire of professional experience in clinical art psychotherapy, administration, teaching, and program development in master’s and doctoral level art therapy education, as well as in arts-based, qualitative, and mixed methods research. She directed the master’s degree program in art therapy for fourteen years and then created and directed the Ph.D Program in Creative Arts Therapies for eight years at Drexel University until coming to FSU.
As a visiting professor within our department, in addition to being thrilled to teach several classes in the master’s degree program, Dr. Gerber also hopes to encourage conversations about the various philosophical and theoretical approaches to research in the arts therapies that preserve our epistemological integrity while generating the robust research necessary for the advancement of knowledge in our fields.
Dr. Gerber began her visiting professorship within the Art Therapy program for the Fall 2018 semester after having presented at the Mixed Methods International Research Association conference in Vienna, Austria; and, having taught a two-day research seminar to creative arts therapies students in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Dr. Gerber’s most recent publications include Arts-based research approaches to studying mechanisms of change and transformation in the Creative Arts Therapies (co-authored with Carol Ann Blank, Karolina Bryl and Noah Potvin, under review), Arts and Mixed Methods Research: An Innovative Methodological Merger (co-authored with Mandy Archibald), and Translation in Arts-Based Research (co-authored with Kate Myers-Coffman). These, and many more of Dr. Gerber’s peer-reviewed articles and book chapters focus on the transformative mechanisms in intersubjective creative arts therapies processes, the integration of the arts into mixed-methods and other forms of research, and arts-based research paradigms and practices for at therapists and beyond. These publications emphasize the importance of the arts and dialectical intersubjective processes as legitimate sources of knowledge that contribute to our understanding of the human condition and consequently, contribute to the advancement of knowledge in the fields of arts therapies.
Dr. Gerber is very pleased to be joining the students and faculty in the Department of Art Education and the Art Therapy Program at FSU. She says that “ . . . .it just proves that you can always start a new chapter in your life and this is an inspiring new chapter for me”