RESEARCH TEAM.

 Prof. Czamanski-Cohen has been practicing as an art therapist since she graduated from NYU in 1999. After almost a decade of clinical practice in adult psychiatry she began PhD studies in social work and health sciences, with the goal of learning how to conduct research that will examine the psychological and physiological effect of art making. During her PhD studies, she conducted several qualitative art therapy studies and assisted in the development of an intervention protocol (CBART) and a series of studies that aimed to examine the ways in which art-based interventions can be used from a cognitive behavioral theoretical framework and how they are beneficial for individuals coping with cancer and chronic pain. She is the recepient of the 2017 Miriam Senarclens Prize for psychosomatics in obstetrics and gynecology. This prize funded the study of the CB-ART protocol with women with elevated stress levels, undergoing in-vitro fertilization treatment. She completed a large RCT, funded by an RO1 grant from the American National Institute of Health (NIH)  http://repat.haifa.ac.il/en/ ( PI with Dr. Karen Weihs from the University of Arizona) aimed at examining emotion processing and the cholinergic anti-inflammatory pathway as primary mechanisms through which art therapy can reduce symptoms of pain, fatigue, and depression in breast cancer patients. Her current career focus is examining the mechanisms of art based and verbal interventions for psychological and physical symptom reduction as part of an over-arching goal of increasing the understanding of the mechanisms through which art therapy has a salutogenic affect. In addition, she is focused on training future generations of art therapists at the University of Haifa’s School of Creative Arts Therapies.