An invitation to SWANA/Middle Eastern and BIPOC Communities
About the workshop:
This workshop is a dedicated space for participants to come together and share Ancestral Healing dances, embodying movements that have carried tradition, wisdom and connection through generations. Moving our own and each other’s dances helps to create a kinesthetic connection with our own lineage and each others’ traditions and the healing embedded within them. As we move together, we experience different movement qualities, rhythms, gestures, and stories that our ancestors once expressed through dance. This part of the workshop serves as a reclamation and remembrance. To conclude, we will engage in reflective drawing that helps integrate our experiences into visual and written expressions.
About the facilitators:
Nancy Toncy, LCPC, BC-DMT, ICDVP, GLCMA:
Nancy is an Egyptian dance/movement therapist who has been providing trauma-informed care since 2004, and is particularly interested in movement as a form of inquiry and a way of knowing. Nancy strongly believes that the body holds wisdom and an innate capacity to move towards healing. Utilizing verbal & somatic modalities and incorporating mindfulness practices, Nancy gently supports clients to explore and understand how trauma lives in their bodies and safely co-creates a path where trauma is processed and integrated in a healthy way.
In addition to seeing clients, Nancy is the Survivor Services Director, managing the Clinical and Court Advocacy programs, at Between Friends – a domestic violence agency that supports survivors of interpersonal violence and builds communities free of abuse.
Nancy received her Master of Arts (MA) in Dance & Movement Therapy and counseling from Columbia College Chicago, Illinois in 2004. She also holds a Graduate Laban Certificate in Movement Analysis, is a Board Certified Dance/Movement Therapist with the American Dance Therapy Association and is certified as a Domestic Violence Professional by the Coalition of Domestic Violence in the State of Illinois. Nancy completed the Level 1 Training for the Treatment of Trauma (2015) and Level II Emotional Processing, Meaning Making and Attachment Repair (2018), through the Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute.
Farah Salem, LCPC, MAATC, is a Kuwaiti-Iraqi interdisciplinary artist and art therapist based in Chicago. Farah’s studio practice is rooted in photography, expanding through video, performance, fiber-materials, and installation. In her studio practice, through relational merging and mapping of human and geological bodies, she visions their liberation. By doing so, she examines themes of agency, making the invisible visible, and potential erosion of socio-cultural conditioning distorting our shared realities. Her visual arts and somatic-centered art therapy practices are independent however they intersect in her professional training, informing her artistic exploration of how trauma manifests in the body. Incorporating tools from ancestral healing wisdom for the recovery of the somatic experience while relating to the natural world. Farah received an MA in Art Therapy and Counseling from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Farah also is a certified Somatic Experiencing provider and EMDR practitioner. She is the recipient of the 2024 3Arts Award, and is the 2017 Laureate Winner: International Women Photographers Award.
This workshop was supported by Ignite Fund