IACAET Arts & Health Series

Global Webinar

Voices from Portugal  about  Arts Based Relational Approaches in Education, Therapy and Health

Date: Saturday, December 13, 2025

Time: 8AM EST (New York), 2PM CET (Amsterdam), 1PM Portugal, 9PM China, midnight (next day, Sydney)

Online (Zoom)

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**This event will be recorded. Registrants will receive the recording link via email after the live session.**

Overview

This global webinar, part of the IACAET Arts & Health Series, brings together leading voices from around the world to reflect on Arts in Health as a rapidly growing and evolving field. We will explore its history, current frontiers, and emerging futures, examining how this discipline has developed across different regions, cultures, and contexts.

The session will feature presentations from internationally recognized leaders, followed by an interactive panel discussion and open dialogue among professionals from diverse disciplines, including healthcare, therapy, education, community development, and the arts. Participants will have the opportunity to engage directly with panelists and fellow attendees in this unique cross-sector, cross-cultural exchange.

Webinar Description

Since the 70s, Portuguese arts educators and health professionals were interested in the contribution of arts in educational and well-being settings, exploring learning through art and arts as a tool for connecting people. Portugal hosted the first UNESCO global summit on Arts Education in 2006 and during the last twenty years cultural actors and arts educators have conducted interesting experiments both in formal and non-formal settings. May be because of such backgrounds, arts are more and more valued as a relational tool in Portugal.  This webinar is curated by Teresa Torres de Eça, President of the Portuguese Association of Teachers of Visual Expression and Communication. She will invite key figures in the field of arts in education, community arts education and arts for wellbeing and repair to showcase the diverse approaches of arts based strategies in Portugal.

Andreia Dias, educational programmer, cultural mediator, art educator, and trainer will talk about the project Lugar ( Place)  organised in the Contemporary Art Center in Lisbon ( CAM). LUGAR (in its third edition) is a participatory project of education and artistic creation by CAM, in collaboration with invited artist Maja Escher, 5 cultural-artistic museum mediators and 227 students aged between 5 and 10 years, from one elementary school is Lisbon which proposes a reflection on the notion of ecology, the relationships, and the fabrication of fertile futures, based on interconnectivity and interdependence among species, sustainability, and imagination.

Claudia Ormonde, visual art teacher, from a critical, postcolonial, and environmentally committed pedagogy point of view, will bring her experience in developing collaborative, aesthetically meaningful, and ecologically conscious pedagogical practices that foster critical reflection on the image as a cultural, social, and environmental agent. 

Angela Saldanha, community based artist,  will talk about arts education based methods  she developed for APECV in community projects and in teacher training courses for learning through caring, wandering, drifts and error.   

Marta Tagarro, art psychotherapist:  in her presentation, will share her experience as an art psychotherapist, offering insights into how creative processes serve as powerful tools for transformation. Drawing from her clinical practice, she will illustrate how art-making can support emotional healing, enhance self-awareness, and reshape the ways individuals connect with themselves and with others.

Patricia Martins will talk about arts and books as creative encounters, places of empathy and caring. 

Alexandra Baudouin, visual art teacher, committed with a pedagogy of care, will point out key points about art with children in elementary schools. 

Albane Buriel, a collaborator of APECV  will bring a more international perspective into arts based educational practices in fractured societies,  by discussing  the intersections of pedagogy, artistic expression and memory in contexts marked by war, exile or political violence. 

Participants of the webinar will be invited to join the discussion after the presenters share their views (Q&A)  and make connections for possible collaborations with the speakers. 

Expected Outcomes

• An understanding of how arts based approaches are used in Portugal according to the different contexts of culture, education, health and therapy.  

• Insight into how artistic relational strategies are employed to foster inclusions and   wellbeing with communities.  
• Overview of diversity of purposes, approaches and strategies of arts in education for children, young people and adults. 

Speakers

Teresa Torres de  Eça, born in 1961 in  Portugal. Has a long career as visual arts teacher; arts education researcher and visual artist. Currently, she is teacher trainer at the Portuguese Association of Teachers of Visual Expression and Communication APECV and Coordinates the Research Group in Arts, Community and Education at the Portuguese Association of Teachers of APECV. 

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0124-7377

Ângela Saldanha, born in 1984 in Portugal. Has undergone 2 Postdoctoral degrees in Digital Media Art, Open University, Lisbon and  PhD in Arts Education, Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Porto, Portugal. She has several academic backgrounds in the area of multimedia, ceramics and contemporary artistic production.. She was APECV coordinator in the European Commission-funded research project ‘Acting on the Margins: Arts as Social Sculpture’ (AMASS, 2020–2023).

orcid.org/0000-0003-0404-0088

Albane Buriel is a French researcher, born in 1988.  Lecturer and consultant in education, arts and social transformation, collaborates with the Portuguese Association APECV, were she created the MOOC ‘Arts, Armed Conflict and Humanitarian Aid’. She holds a PhD in Sciences of  Education and works across crisis-affected regions such as Syria, Iraq, Palestine and Romania. Albane is the founder of Art to Face Consulting, where she designs and supports educational, artistic and training projects with NGOs, artists, and international institutions. She also leads Les Ateliers du Rêve, an association dedicated to working with dreams and art as spaces of resistance, imagination and collective reconstruction. Her work engages with questions of power, voice and cultural justice in conflict and post-conflict contexts.

Patricia Martins born in 1978, holds a degree in Cultural Animation; postgraduate degree in Communication and Marketing and a Master’s degree in Cultural Management, she is currently a PhD candidate on Artistic Studies, focusing about cultural-artistic mediation, in learning environments, as well as contribute to citizenship and ethics of care. She is a cultural and artistic mediator and has extensive experience in the field of participatory projects reading mediation. She often uses books as devices for the creation of transversal artistic projects, with a particular focus on schools and the community. Furthermore, she has published several books for children in Portuguese language. Sometimes a mediator, sometimes a teacher, sometimes a trainer, sometimes cultural programmer, she often says she is lucky because she works with the arts, particularly with books, with people and with affection.

Marta Tagarro a Clinical Psychologist and holds a PhD in Educational Psychology. She is a certified specialist in Art Therapy and Art Psychotherapy by the Portuguese Society of Art Therapy, as well as in Educational Psychology, Community Psychology, and Psychotherapy by the Portuguese Order of Psychologists.

Since 2023, she has been pursuing studies in Psychoanalysis. Since 2009, she has been a teacher at the Polytechnic Institute of Santarém, where she teaches courses such as group dynamics and social intervention through art, and supervises both research and internships in Social Education and Basic Education.

She regularly collaborates on national and international projects in areas including non-formal education, social inclusion, interculturality, and creativity. In addition to her academic and research work, she also practices psychotherapy, providing support to individuals of various ages and with diverse psychological conditions.

Andreia Dias is responsible for the areas of Education – Schools and other Educational Institutions and Children and Families, in the Education, Mediation, and Participation area of CAM – Modern Art Center, of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, since 2021, having held the same position between 2016 and 2021 at the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum (Modern Collection and Founder’s Collection). Since 2017, she has developed a line of participatory, collaborative, or co-creation art based projects between the museum and schools  – Project Factory . She’s also a collaborator researcher at  several Portuguese Research Centers, and writes for patrimonio.pt.

Alexandra Baudoiun Arts teacher in elementary education, arts education researcher.  She has solid experience in arts through education, education through playing and creative arts with children. She is also an APECV trainer, she conceptualized the MOOC ‘ Artistic Process in Educational Contexts. 

Cláudia Ormonde born in 1975 in Portugal.  Has been a Visual Arts teacher since 1997 She holds a degree in Visual Communication Design, a master’s in Multimedia Technologies, and is currently conducting a PhD in Art Education with  ‘Bioimages’ project. Her research offers a critical analysis of the relationship between image production and environmental sustainability, within the framework of an action-research project in a school context. As part of the Bioimages project, her research is structured around three key axes — historical, artistic-educational, and experimental — and explores the concept of image ecology as a foundation for new educational methodologies. She argues that a sustainable image goes beyond technique or materiality, encompassing its meaning, impact, and responsibility.