Season 1 -Ep.6 Dr. Carla Van Laar - Creative Arts Therapist (Australia)
Master Creative Arts Therapy
Doctor Therapeutic Arts Practice
PACFA Clinical Registrant 27769
PACFA Accredited Supervisor
Carla is an Artist and Creative Arts Therapist based in Boon Wurrung Country, Inverloch, Victoria. She brings decades of experience working with people and the arts for well-being in community, justice, health, education, and private practice contexts.
Experiential ways of knowing underpin Carla’s therapeutic work, including embodied attunement and arts-based responding, informed by trauma-centered, strengths-based, existential, and narrative approaches. She loves to share creative practices as ways of knowing and being.
Carla’s book Bereaved Mother’s Heart (2007) broke social taboos about maternal grief. Seeing Her Stories (2020) presents Carla’s research into making Women’s stories visible through art. Her most recent publication is “Art Therapy First Aid: Growing Capacity with Art Therapists in Communities Affected by Australian Bushfires”(in Scarce, J. (Ed.) 2022).
An educator in the field of Creative Art Therapy since 2001, Carla received an Artist Fellowship at RMIT’s creative research lab, “Creative Agency” in 2018. She is a lead campaigner in the ACTivate Arts Therapy collective, and Founding Director of the Creative Mental Health Forum. Carla insists on being part of a creative revolution in which art re-embodies lived experience, brings us to our senses, makes us aware of the interconnectedness of all life, and is an agent of social change.
Carla is the Convenor of the Psychotherapy and Counselling Federation of Australia (PACFA)’s College of Creative and Experiential Therapies, and in this role, she is dedicated to working for access to creative therapies for everyone.
