Shaun McNiff is the founder of the first Expressive Arts Therapy graduate training program at Lesley University and University Professor Emeritus. He established the Institute for Arts and Human Development at Lesley, serving as Director and then Dean from 1974-1988. He is a past president of the American Art Therapy Association and Honorary Life Member. His work emphasizes the art process, art-based research, and the transformative power of making and responding to art, including the way creative expression can welcome difficult experience without reducing it to diagnostic concepts.
Specialties
Depth orientation
McNiff's work in expressive arts therapy draws on depth psychological and archetypal traditions while centering the art process itself: artistic intelligence, creative energy, and an ongoing response to images through further making.