Wendy L. Miller, PhD

 

     Wendy Miller Ph.D., LPC-BCPC, ATR-BC, LCPAT, REAT, is a writer, sculptor, expressive arts therapist, and educator. She has taught at JFK University, San Francisco State University, Southwestern College, Lesley College, California Institute of Integral Studies, and George Washington University. She is the cofounder of Create Therapy Institute, which offers clinical services in arts-based psychotherapy and trainings in experiential approaches to learning. She is a founding member and first elected (past) executive co-chair of the International Expressive Arts Therapy Association, where she continues to be on their Advisory Council. She is also on the Advisory Board of MaineGeneral’s Healthy Living Resource Center and Blossom Arts Board of Advisors.

     Miller’s skills take her into the worlds of fine art, writing, psychology, expressive arts therapy, and mind­–body medicine. She has published on medical illness and the arts as complementary medicine, the use of sand tray therapy with internationally adopted children, experiential approaches to supervision in expressive arts therapy, and the cultural responsibility of the arts in therapy. Her current work is evolving as she continues the legacy of her late husband’s work and his Washington, DC, Center on Aging, where she is guiding it into projects on intergenerational communication. She continues to research the relationships among the arts, creativity, and health.

 

 

Gene D. Cohen, MD, PhD

 

     Gene D. Cohen, M.D., Ph.D., is considered one of the founding fathers of the field of geriatric psychiatry. He was the first director of the Center on Aging, Health & Humanities (established in 1994) at George Washington University, where he held the positions of professor of health care sciences and professor of psychiatry. He is a past-president of the Gerontological Society of America. During 1991­–1993, he served as acting director of the National Institute on Aging (NIA) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Before coming to NIA, Dr. Cohen served as the first chief of the Center on Aging of the National Institute of Mental Health—the first federal center on mental health and aging established in any country. In addition, he also coordinated the Department of Health and Human Services’ planning and programs on Alzheimer’s disease, through the efforts of the Department’s Council and Panel on Alzheimer’s disease. For his recent research on Alzheimer’s disease, he was awarded first place in the Blair Sadler International Healing Arts Competition from the Society for the Arts in Health Care. He was founding director of the Washington, D.C. Center on Aging and past president of the Gerontological Society of America. He appeared on Nightline, The MacNeil/Lehrer Report, and the CBS Nightly News, and appeared in a series of public service messages on aging with George Burns and Steve Allen. He invented four intergenerational board games, one that was selected by an international art jury for a three-year museum tour.

     He is the author of more than 150 publications in the field of aging, including The Brain in Human Aging, published by Springer, in their Series on Life Style and Issues in Aging, in 1988, and the first book on creativity and aging, published in 2000 by Avon, The Creative Age: Awakening Human Potential in the Second of Life. PBS did a one-hour TV program on The Creative Age, and the book is published in six languages. In 2005, Basic Books published The Mature Mind: The Positive Power of the Aging Brain.

 

 

Teresa H. Barker, Co-writer

 

     A career journalist and book collaborator, Teresa Barker has co-written more than a dozen books in the fields of parenting and child development, adult psychology, creativity and aging, personal growth, healing, and spirituality. She collaborated with Gene Cohen on The Creative Age and The Mature Mind. She also is co-writer of The New York Times bestsellers Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys (Michael G. Thompson and Dan Kindlon) and The Spiritual Child: The New Science of Parenting for Health and Lifelong Thriving (Lisa Miller). Other recent titles include The Big Disconnect: Protecting Childhood and Family Relationships in the Digital Age (Catherine Steiner-Adair), and Self-Reg: How to Help Your Child (and You) Break the Stress Cycle and Successfully Engage with Life (Stuart Shanker).