Currently, Nancy is working with eating disorder patients for The Healing Memory Project, a collaboration with Pittsburgh-based art psychotherapist Lauren Lazar Stern, author of “The Slender Trap.”  Gershman is also the editor of The Open to Hope Foundations’ Art, Hope and Healing website which will be the first repository of articles and essays submitted by amateur/professional artists, expressive artists and prescriptive artists on how and why they use their particular medium and methodology for healing.

Gershman received her formal art training from Hampshire College, graduating with a B.A. in Design and Communications. Her studies in behavioral psychology were shaped in childhood (having been raised by a mother with Obsessive Compulsive Syndrome), her eldest son’s bout with anorexia at age 17 and by two decades in advertising, teasing out motivational behavior from interviews and focus groups. Suspending disbelief and turning things on their head is still her aim, only now Gershman is eager to share why it’s healthy – and cathartic – to do so.

 To learn more about how families have been healed by her therapeutic artwork, visit Nancy’s portfolio online, Art For Your Sake (www.artforyoursake.com).   

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 #1:   Watch Agnieska Ziemacka-Masters’ documentary, “The Healing Dreamscapes of Nancy Gershman” on YouTube. In Agnieska Ziemacka-Master’s documentary, “The Healing Dreamscapes of Nancy Gershman,” the artist describes her methodology for healing regrets and heartache by digitally repurposing personal photographs into wishful visualizations.  What happens when Gershman gives our lives the “epic treatment”?  Happiness, satisfaction, and relief. We meet the mother of a murdered son, tickled by a memory created from scratch. Or the Holocaust survivor’s daughter thrilled to see her dad – a year after he’s passed away – enjoying a turkey leg with a granddaughter he’s never met.  The intuition to know which details and in what combination: this is Gershman’s true artistry.

Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QX3hnNtLKpI

Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7qwLYkXlAM

Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4anzUBhivw

Part 4: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpqbpzdfoY0

#2:  See the the 2009 article in Advance for Nurses, “Positive Visualization: Photomontage helps individuals cope with grief” by Rachel Christophe Baker.

Ann Solari-Twadell, Assistant Professor, Loyola University writes this of her experience co-creating a dreamscape with Nancy Gershman for The Hektoen Institute of Medicine’s Nurses & The Humanities Program: “Nancy is very good at creating an intimacy and a sacredness conducive to sharing and respecting your stories.”

 

#3:   View the one man show of Nancy Gershman’s prescriptive photomontages Dec 5, 2008-January 6, 2009 at LUMA (Loyola University Museum of Art, Chicago). These nineteen healing dreamscapes – created for a range of clients who sought closure from bereavement, addictive behaviors and ruptured relationships – hang alongside the spoken words of the subjects’ themselves. [Curator: Pamela E. Ambrose]

“The Healing Dreamscapes of Nancy Gershman”   http://picasaweb.google.com/Gershman.Nancy/DreamscapingTheTherapeuticPhotomontagesOfNancyGershman?feat=directlink

Pamela E. Ambrose, Director of The Loyola University Museum of Art writes: “Gershman’s photomontages reference 20^th century artists Hannah Hoch and Joseh Cornell, and filmmakers Luis Bunuel, Salvador Dali, and Rene Clair, whose use of collage, assemblage, and montage probed the human subconscious for hidden or mythic meanings.”

Contact Info:

Website: www. www.artforyoursake.com/healing
E-mail: nancy@artforyoursake.com
Phone: (773) 255-4677
Address: 522 West Barry Avenue, Chicago, IL  60657-5417