Doctor Catherine Camden-Pratt

Dr Catherine Camden Pratt is a Lecturer in Art Therapy in the School of Social Sciences and Psychology. Catherine’s clinically-led teaching is informed by her private art therapy practice in which she works mainly with women, children and their families, and also facilitates art therapy groups for Cancer Wellness Support. As well as this, she draws on many years of working with creative arts in education, and in personal and social change. A long-time social ecologist with a focus on ecological thinking, feminism, poststructuralism and critical psychology as ways to open up questions of power and voice, Catherine locates art therapy performatively as a practice of social justice, and is passionate about making art as a way of knowing and of sharing stories for which there are no words. Catherine is a nationally-awarded experiential educator with over 35 years of experience in creative arts based teaching across a variety of contexts. Her teaching is student-centred and foregrounds critical creativity as a way to enable understandings about ideas of identities as shaped by society, culture and politics, and that are central to art therapy. Out of the shadows: daughters growing up with a ‘mad’ mother (Finch), Catherine’s 2006 sole-authored popular press book from her arts-based interdisciplinary PhD shares the stories of women growing up in families with a mother with a mental illness. In 2011 as Senior Lecturer in Social Ecology at Western, she co-edited the first social ecology text in Australia Social Ecology: Applying Ecological Understanding to our Lives and our Planet (Hawthorn Press). She has exhibited her mixed media artwork, as well as performed co-written research plays and alongside scholarly books and journals, is published in poetry and narrative anthologies. Catherine enjoys spending time with family and friends, writing narrative and poetry, making art and being in the bush.

This information has been contributed by Doctor Camden-Pratt.