Gioia Chilton

Gioia Chilton, PhD, ATR-BC is a Provost Fellow and the first ever graduate of Drexel University’s Creative Arts Therapies Department new Ph.D. Program.  Her dissertation was titled, An Arts-Based Study of the Dynamics of Expressing Positive Emotions within the Intersubjective Art Making Process.  As adjunct faculty with three universities, Gioia teaches artistic inquiry to doctoral students at Mount Mary University, positive psychology to graduate students at the George Washington University, and introduction to art therapy to undergraduates at Marymount University.  Gioia is an artist interested in mixed media and altered art, and has worked with children, adolescents and adults with mental health needs as a registered and board certified art therapist for over 18 years.  In 2010, she co-founded Creative Wellbeing Workshops, LLC, where she provides continuing education trainings on happiness strategies.  Author of numerous articles in peer-reviewed journals and publications, she recently co-authored a chapter on arts-based research for the prestigious Oxford Handbook of Qualitative Research (forthcoming).

 

Q.What motivated you to become an arts therapist?

 What motivated me to become an art therapist and still does today is wanting to be a positive change agent using my character strengths of love of people, creativity, appreciation of beauty and excellence, and curiosity to enact my love of art therapy, education and research to promote the wellbeing of individuals from varied socio-economic backgrounds

So part of that was founding my business:  Creative Wellbeing Workshops, LLC, was founded by Rebecca Wilkinson, MA, ATR-BC and myself in 2010 and we provide workshops, consulting, and support to individuals and organizations experiencing high levels of stress. We are based in Washington DC and provide services on-site throughout the country.

Q. Can you tell us more about how your business evolved?

We started providing workshops after we had been training art therapists and mental health professionals about Positive Psychology, “the science of wellbeing” (based upon the premise that the relief of suffering does not necessarily lead to happiness and that wellbeing emerges as much from focusing on strengths than trying to correct weakness).  During one of our presentations, an art therapist who had become a law enforcement officer urged us to do a workshop at her agency.  She felt that her fellow officers had become so burnt out that they had lost sight of the strengths that had brought them to their work.  We realized that we wanted to reach out more to “frontline providers”–police officers, hospital workers, mental health providers, frazzled moms, etc… and help them reconnect with the values and passion that initially moved them to choose their field. That inspired us to create a service in which we provided organizations with on-site workshops blending positive psychology principles with arts based interventions designed to reduce burnout and stress and increase wellbeing, vitality, and engagement.

We created a concise “menu” of workshops from which organizations can choose (e.g.; Drawing Strengths: Identifying and Developing Our Highest Potential, Bouncing Forward: Creatively Dealing with Adversity; and Arts Based Creativity Workshops such as Gratitude Art Journaling, Altered Books, Mandalas for Centering, etc). The menu helped us develop content which we could easily repeat (with minor tweaking based upon the needs that the organization identifies). We offer a discount for booking a “package” of multiple workshops.

We also provide supervision and consultation and we see clients individually.  Many of our referrals come from the workshops we have provided.  Because we knew that it might take a couple of years for us to become profitable, we focused first getting our name out there, collaborating with others, and establishing ourselves in the art therapy community and in the broader mental health community

Q. What lessons have you learnt along the way? 

The greatest lessons we have learned were the following:  Clarify your mission and vision, it will help sustain you while you experiment with different approaches to marketing and getting clients.  Become a resource to others and your community—be less attached to getting customers than to educating and empowering others.  Develop relationships not clients.  Think of what your ideal practice would like in the future and work back from there.  If you work with partners, think highly of them and capitalize on the strengths you each bring.

Visit here to find out more about Creative Wellbeing Workshops www.creativewellbeingworkshops.com

Q. As well as developing your business you have been working on your PhD, tell us about that?

From 2010-to March, 2014 I was getting my PhD in creative art therapy. Recently also  I won an award for my dissertation research, E. Paul Torrance Graduate Student Research Award for 2014

Q. Describe yourself and your involvement as a student?

I’m outgoing and passionate about what I do.  I worked for almost two decades before I started at Drexel, so as a student, I got to really indulge my love of learning new things and extending my understanding of the world, so it was an amazing experience.

Q. What aspects of arts based research have you been studying?

I’m something of a jack-of-all-trades in arts-based research.  As a visual artist, I’ve used altered books as inquiry, mixed media collage for a data analysis concept map, and painted a painting as a form of arts-based data analysis.  With the help of a video editor, I created a short film, and I’ve written poetry. I just finished a collaborative project with Drexel PhD candidate, Victoria Scotti, using collage, to study its properties. And I just completed my first fiction-as-research short story.  So having used all these different mediums, I am really interested in why we should use one art form over another in arts-based research.  I got to write about this a little bit with Dr Patricia Leavy in our recent chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Qualitative Research (2014).

Q. How did it feel to be awarded the E. Paul Torrance Graduate Student Research Award?

It was amazing, not just have my personal work recognized, but that the award drew attention to the new Creative Arts Therapy PhD Program at Drexel, led by the extraordinary Dr. Nancy Gerber, and highlighted the level of rigor that my dissertation committee helped me to craft while using arts-based research.  I felt the award also served to help recognize the importance of creativity in research, as opposed to just as the subject of research.

Q. What did you find surprising, if anything, about the research?

My biggest surprise was the welcome I received from scholars like Drs. Shaun McNiff, Susan Finely, Patricia Leavy, Carolyn Kinney, Carolyn Ellis, Laurel Richardson and others who were amazing mentors and provided so much inspiration.

Q. What is your advice to students interested in doing arts based research?

I would say—and Shaun McNiff discussed this as well—it is important to be clear about what you are going to do and the objectives related to each step.  So if you are going to do artwork, you do not have to know ahead of time what the result would be (you would need a time machine to do that!) but instead have a clear intention and objective for the work.  This also makes it easier to explain to others why it is necessary to make art in research. For example, in my research, in my methods chapter, I identified that I would create a mixed media concept map using collage techniques but I also identified why I did this, that is, to map data in order to visually locate and link patterns, images, symbols, metaphors, themes, as well as to identify tensions and disruptions in the map–and in the data.

Map image from:  Chilton, G. (2014). An Arts-Based Study of the Dynamics of Expressing Positive Emotions within the Intersubjective Art Making Process.  Doctoral Dissertation, Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA.

Q. Now with your PhD behind you what do you want to focus on? 

From here I’d like to use a 20 years experience as an art therapist and what I know now as an arts-based researcher to promote research and scholarship in the field of art therapy. I also want to keep doing art & art therapy.  So I am looking for opportunities to teach, do research, and collaborate with art therapists.

Current  Open Access Publications:

Chilton, G. (2013).  Altered inquiry: Discovering arts-based research through an altered book.  International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 12,457-477. Available: http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/IJQM/article/view/17416/15713

 Chilton, G. (2013).  Art Therapy and Flow: A review of the literature and applications. Art Therapy: Journal of the American Art Therapy Association,30(2), 64-70.

 Manders, E., Chilton, G. (2013). Translating the essence of dance: Rendering meaning in artistic inquiry of the creative arts therapies. International Journal of Education & the Arts, 14(16).  Available: http://www.ijea.org/v14n16/

Additional current  Publications:

Chilton, G. (2014). An Arts-Based Study of the Dynamics of Expressing Positive Emotions within the Intersubjective Art Making Process.  Doctoral Dissertation, Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA.   Available

 Chilton, G. (2013).  Art Therapy and Flow: A Review of the Literature and Applications. Art Therapy:           Journal of the American Art Therapy Association,30(2), 64-70.

Wilkinson, R. A. & Chilton, G. (2013). Positive Art Therapy: Linking Positive Psychology to Art          Therapy Theory, Practice, and Research. Art Therapy: Journal of the American Art Therapy    Association, 30(1), 4-11.