Curated by:

Prof. Vivien Marcow Speiser, Ph.D., LMHC, NCC, BC-DMT, REAT — Professor Emerita and Co-Director of the Institute for Arts and Health, Lesley University; Editor-in-Chief, Creative Arts in Education and Therapy (CAET). Professor Speiser has directed and taught in programs across the United States and internationally for over 40 years, using the arts as a way of learning and communicating across borders and cultures. Her work spans expressive arts therapies, disaster relief, conflict transformation, and trauma.

Dr. Tony Yu Zhou, Ph.D., CMA — CEO of IACAET; Founder of Inspirees Education Group; Guest Professor at Beijing Normal University; Co-founder and Editorial Board Member of Creative Arts Education and Therapy (CAET); Team Leader for the Chinese Group of Arts Therapy, Chinese Psychological Society; International Advisory Board, Body, Movement and Dance in Psychotherapy; Certified Movement Analyst (LIMS, New York). Dr. Zhou holds a doctoral degree in biomedicine and has played a key role in driving the development of creative arts therapy and education in China and globally.

Voices from Southern Africa: African Perspectives on Decolonizing the Creative Arts in Community, Education, Therapy, and Health

IACAET Global Dialogue Series

This dialogue centers historically marginalized epistemologies from Southern Africa to challenge and expand dominant Western paradigms in the creative arts. By exploring Indigenous knowledge systems and the ethic of Ubuntu, the discussion illuminates how relational and land-based practices can transform inquiry, care, and systemic frameworks in health and education.

Event Details

Date & Time: May 31st, 2026
14:30 – 16:00 Johannesburg (SAST) / 08:30 – 10:00 New York (EDT) / 20:30 – 22:00 Beijing & Hong Kong (CST)

To easily convert the time to your local time zone, please use this World Time Buddy tool.

Platform: Online (Zoom)
Duration: 90 minutes

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

The International Association for Creative Arts in Education and Therapy (IACAET) is pleased to announce an upcoming webinar in its Global Dialogue Series: Voices from Southern Africa. This webinar is offered through its Arts & Health Global Series (https://www.iacaet.org/iacaet-arts-health-global-dialogue-series/). This gathering convenes scholars, practitioners, arts therapists, artists, educators, and cultural leaders to engage a critical and generative dialogue on the role of the creative arts across community, education, therapy, and health. Centering perspectives from Southern Africa, the conversation foregrounds epistemologies and practices historically marginalized within dominant Western paradigms.

At the heart of this webinar is decolonization, not as metaphor, but as an ethical, political, and epistemological reorientation of the field. Drawing on Indigenous knowledge systems that understand knowledge as relational, land-based, embodied, and communally transmitted, the dialogue explores how creative arts practices can move beyond positivist hierarchies of evidence toward culturally grounded, contextually responsive, and relationally accountable forms of inquiry and care.

Southern African philosophical traditions, including the ethic of Ubuntu, articulated globally through the work of Desmond Tutu—invite us to understand personhood as emergent through relationship: umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu (a person is a person through other persons). Within arts therapy training and community arts praxis in the region, these principles are enacted through circle processes, call-and-response structures, embodied witnessing, ritual, and aesthetic co-creation. Healing is understood not solely as individual clinical intervention, but as restoration of relational balance among body, spirit, community, land, and ancestral presence.

The conversation also aligns with and builds upon scholarship published in the Creative Arts in Education and Therapy Journal (CAET), which has consistently advanced global, intercultural, and decolonial perspectives in creative arts applications in education, health, and therapy. CAET’s dialogic ethos, foregrounding relational aesthetics, transnational exchange, and epistemic plurality, provides an important scholarly foundation for this exchange. Global arts and health frameworks, including those articulated by the World Health Organization, further affirm the role of the arts in promoting wellbeing across the lifespan, while inviting critical reflection on whose knowledge systems shape definitions of evidence, health, and healing.

This webinar affirms creativity as a collective right and a site of dignity, belonging, and restoration. Rather than merely integrating the arts into existing systems, Voices from Southern Africa invites participants to imagine how those systems themselves might be transformed through sustained dialogue, cultural humility, and relational reciprocity.

We look forward to welcoming you into this important and timely exchange.

Presenters

Dr Kim Berman

is Professor Emerita in Visual Art at the University of Johannesburg (UJ) and Executive Director of Artist Proof Studio (APS), a community-based printmaking centre she co-founded with the late Nhlanhla Xaba in 1991. She has lectured and exhibited widely in South Africa and internationally. Holder of a C2-rating, she is active in research. She is committed to engaging arts for social change through her activism and teaching. Her book, Finding Voice: A visual approach to engaging change (2017), published by the University of Michigan Press values the notion of voice as key to agency and the responsibility to act.

Scopus Author ID: 55316550000

Dr. Sinethemba Makanya

is a drama therapist, researcher, and inyanga (indigenous healer) working at the intersection of creative arts therapies, African cosmology, and the medical and health humanities. Her work explores indigenous and critical perspectives on healing, embodied approaches to healing, and the politics of knowledge production in South Africa. She trained in drama therapy at New York University and completed her PhD in medical humanities and psychology at the Wits Institute of Social and Economic Research at the University of the Witwatersrand. Makanya is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Johannesburg, where she heads the Art Therapy programme and continues to explore how African cosmologies can inform theory and practice in the creative arts therapies.

Dr. Linda Mdena Thibedi

is a dancer, performer, lecturer and a registered Drama Therapist with the Health Professions council of South Africa (HPCSA) and South African National Association of Arts Therapies (SANATA). Linda graduated from Wits University with an Honours degree in 2013. In 2015, Linda completed her Master’s Degree in Drama Therapy at the University of the Witwatersrand. Linda became an Expressive Movement facilitator in 2016 and in the same year was chosen to be a part of the first Drama for Life Theatre Company. In 2017, she started Lecturing at Witwatersrand University in the Drama for Life drama therapy honours and masters programs. Linda has been a part of the Drama for Life leadership team since 2019 and is now the Head of Department for Drama for Life.

Linda’s PhD research, titled: Bodies in crisis: exploring how the body, as a tool in Drama Therapy and Dance Therapy, offers insight into the effects of teaching online. Her curiosity, sparked during the events of COVID-19 and lockdown, is around human responses and processing in the use of online platforms for teaching purposes.

Nsamu Moonga

holds a BA in Psychology and an MMT and is a Zambian-born singer, licensed music therapist, and psychotherapist whose practice and scholarship sit at the intersection of Indigenous knowledge systems, psycho-oncology, and the musical arts. Registered with the Health Professions Council of South Africa and the Zambia Counselling Council, he is completing his Doctor of Music at the University of Pretoria, where he lectures alongside his role as Lecturer and PGCATHE Course Lead at Open Window University.

His doctoral research, conducted at Lusaka’s Cancer Diseases Hospital, explores how Zambian Indigenous musical arts, including ceremony, ritual song, drumming, and conversation circles, can address the psychosocial care gaps facing persons with cancer. Grounded in desire-based inquiry and Indigenous research methodologies, his work foregrounds Ubuntu, relational accountability, and cultural sovereignty as both ethical commitments and forms of evidence.

Nsamu has served on the World Federation of Music Therapy, the International Association for Music and Medicine, and the South African National Arts Therapies Association. He sits on the editorial boards of Voices and the South African Journal of the Arts Therapies. His scholarship advocates for anti-oppressive, non-interventionist approaches to health — centring the healing knowledge already carried within communities, and insisting that Indigenous musical traditions do not require Western validation to be whole.

Marlize Swanepoel

is a Drama Therapist and the co-founder of sp(i)eel arts therapies collective. She enjoys being in spaces of learning, unlearning, connecting and dancing. Her area of interest lies in contributing to the development of trauma-informed and healing-centered arts-based psychosocial practices that are relevant to the South African context and helps to create wider access to mental health services.

Nonkululeko Vilakazi

is a registered Drama and Movement Psychotherapist with a particular interest in African-informed and cross-cultural approaches to psychotherapy that advance cultural diversity and inclusion within mental health services. Her research explores multicultural bereavement rituals and their psychoanalytic significance in grief-informed drama and movement therapy, with additional focus on ethnographic and hermeneutic phenomenological studies of pain and rage within trauma-informed practice. She is a Master’s Drama Therapy and Hons Research Lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. Vilakazi is currently pursuing a PhD focused on developing a biopsychosocial-spiritual framework for adolescent mental health.