our team

BA(Hons), MA ATh, PhD, AThR

Sheridan is Associate Professor of Art Therapy in the School of Social Sciences at Western Sydney University, where she is also Discipline Lead for Arts Therapy and Counselling, and teaches in the Master of Art Therapy program. She is interested in arts-informed, narrative and new-materialist approaches with the potential to decolonise teaching, research and clinical practice. She works with others to question and reshape professional and therapeutic discourse, counter marginalisation and move beyond individualistic accounts of well-being. Sheridan has more than 30 years of field experience working therapeutically with the effects of violence, abuse and neglect on individuals and families, supervising and training other therapists and formulating new approaches to this area of work. She trained in psychodrama as well as narrative therapy and art therapy, is a practising poet, and occasionally participates in collaborative art exhibitions and performances.

BA(Hons), GradDip CAT, MACAT, ProfDoc, AThR

Stacey is an academic working at the MIECAT Institute, Australia. In this capacity she supervises doctoral candidates, teaches in the master’s course, and works on curriculum development. Stacey has previously worked as an arts therapist with children experiencing grief and loss. Her current interests involve exploring emergent content in the process of arts-making, and the relationship between artist and materials. It is the collaborative relational aspect of engaging lived experiencing, using multi-modal art forms to inquire into what is meaningful, that drives Stacey’s work practice and research interests.

BA(Hons)(Drama), MEd, PGDip(Adult Ed), MAAT(Clin), PhD, AThR

Based in Ōtautahi Christchurch, Deborah is Head of School at Whitecliffe’s School of Creative Arts Therapies. Following a career in the South African university and health sectors, she moved to Aotearoa New Zealand, gained her Master of Arts in Arts Therapy (Whitecliffe) and spent several years working with those affected by the Canterbury earthquakes (2010–11). She received her PhD from the University of Auckland for an autoethnographic arts-based thesis exploring this experience. She has published in books and journals, and presented at conferences in Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, Canada and the UK.

MA, MA ArtAdmin, BFA, AThR

Daniel is an art therapist and researches the intersection between the arts, health and well-being. He has worked in Australia, Thailand and Singapore with diverse populations for over 18 years. His interests span from object-making and material engagements to embodied creative practices, relational dynamics and their applications in grief, traumatic stress and post-traumatic growth. A trained artist, he works primarily with fabric, yarns and found discarded or other ephemera. The attraction lies in their aesthetic, sensory and ideational appeal and the unfinished unpredictability of things as they are circulated, reimagined and refashioned into assemblages, collages or bricolages. Daniel is a committee member of the Art Therapy Foundation Thailand and teaches in the MA Art Therapy programme at LASALLE College of The Arts in Singapore. In 2021, his first co-edited book, Found Objects in Art Therapy: Materials and Process with Ronald Lay, was published by Jessica Kingsley (UK).