ABR GlobalConsortium
ABR Global Seminar Series Presenters
ABR Global Consortium Team
The ABR Global Consortium Team was formed in 2019 at the European Congress of Qualitative Inquiry. The team is comprised of ABR scholars representing multiple disciplines, cultures and countries The team and the consortium was formed to advocate for the advancement, visibility and sustainability of internaional arts-based research. From left to right: .Dr. Elisabetta Biffi, Dr. Karin Hannes, Dr. RIchard Siegesmund, Dr. Nancy Gerber, Dr. Jacelyn Biondo, and Dr. Marco Gemiganani. Not pictured here is Dr. Sara Coemans and Luicia Carriera who are two essential members of our ABR Global Classroom and Semianr Series. For more information about the team please go
Alessandra (Ales) Abruzzese
Visual Artist, University Professor, and book editor. Based in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia.
Master's in Visual Arts, specializing in conceptualization and creation of plastic expressions, from the National School of Art in Clermont-Ferrand, France. She has participated in national and international residencies, as well as collective and solo exhibitions.
Currently active in contemporary art production, she is a research professor at UCB in the Graphic Digital Design program. Founder of AWA Contemporánea and Editor-in-Chief of AWA Ediciones Abiertas. She is currently pursuing a doctorate in Communication within the Faculty of Social Sciences at KU Leuven, in the Media, Culture & Policy Lab, directed by her promotor, Leen D'Haenens. This doctorate project is part of the CReA UCB project in collaboration with the VLIR UOS program in Belgium. Her dissertation title is "Visual and Sensory Tools for Social Transformation: Exploring the Dialogical Possibilities of Drawing, Graphic Creation and Sensory Resources in Design Communication"
Her research focuses on Community-Based Participatory Action Research (CBPAR) in rural and peri-urban communities of Chiquitania, Bolivia. It examines how dialogical tools, including graphic resources and sensory experiences, foster trust, mutual respect, and communication empowerment among local youth.
Tatiana Chemi
Tatiana Chemi, Ph.D., is Associate Professor at Aalborg University, Denmark, Chair of Educational Innovation, Department of Culture and Learning, where she works in the field of artistic/aesthetic learning and creative processes. She started her career as scholar investigating theatre, comedy and Absurdism (In the Beginning Was the Pun: Comedy and Humour in Samuel Beckett’s Theatre, 2013). From there she moved into post-dramatic, physical theatre and the intersection between theatre and education, looking at creative partnerships in schools (The Art of Arts Integration, 2014), artistic creativity (with Borup and Hersted, Behind the Scenes of Artistic Creativity, 2015) and at artist-led learning in higher education (with Neilson, The Pedagogy of the Moment: Building Artistic Time-Spaces for critical-creative learning, 2022). More recently, she has been looking at theatre laboratories as material and affective places of/for education (A Theatre Laboratory Approach to Pedagogy and Creativity: Odin Teatret and Group Learning, 2018), study that led to the interest in the pedagogy of love and care (with Brattico, E., Fjorback, L. O., & Harmat, L. (Eds.) Arts and Mindfulness Education for Human Flourishing, 2022). In 2013, Aalborg University Press named her Author of the Year and in 2021 she was nominated Teacher of the Year. In 2018-2021 she has led as Principal Investigator the Erasmus+ funded research project, ALL - Artist Led Learning in Higher Education. She is currently involved in a research project exploring theatre laboratories in nursing education (Holistic Learning of Lived and Imagined Experiences – HoLLIE Lab) and arts-based education and educational research with focus on affectivity (love, care, care aesthetics) and critical theories (freedom, hope). She has founded and led the researchers’ group Arts-Based Methods and Performativity in Educational Research (AMPERE), with focus on the arts and/in social justice and communities. Currently, she is founder and leader of the researchers’ group CCARE (Critical-Creativity, the Arts and Research in Education), collecting junior researchers and undergraduate students. She has been Visiting Associate Professor at the University of Chester, UK (2018-2024) and is visiting researcher at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
Karin Hannes
Karin Hannes is professor in transdisciplinary studies and creative research methodology at the Faculty of Social Sciences, KU Leuven. She coordinates the research group Social, Methodological and Theoretical Innovation. The group pushes towards the development of methods and models for positive change in society. Prof. Hannes tests, evaluates, implements, and improves existing methods, techniques, models or data sets generated in fields such as urban development, the public art, design and technology sector, community-based research practice and the global sustainable development area. Where necessary, she re-appropriates methods developed in other disciplines for use in the broad field of humanities, or develops her own innovative approach to respond to emerging social challenges, whilst remaining sensitive to quality control and empirical grounding. Her perspective is multimodal in nature, combining numerical, textual, sensory and/or arts-based research data to study complex social phenomena. She specializes in arts-based, place-based and multisensory designs as well as qualitative evidence synthesis as a meta-review technique.
Elisabeth Ioannides
Elisabeth Ioannides is an education curator and art psychotherapist at EMΣT | The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens. At ΕΜΣΤ, she runs educational programmes for primary schools and vulnerable groups. She also designs, develops, and implements tailor-made, inclusive programmes focused on the participation of the public, in order to introduce participants to contemporary art in ways that help develop their imagination and critical thinking. Since 2017 she has been running the art psychotherapy group “Exploring the Museum’s Images – Exploring My Image”. Currently, with art psychotherapist K. Ramadani they realise an art psychotherapy group at EMΣT as part of the “Art on Prescription” pilot phase that has begun in Greece. She has been on Advisory Committees of the Ministry of Culture and Sports for the examination of proposals for grants and/or Sponsorships, events and programs that promote accessibility for people with disabilities in culture. In 2021 & 2023 she was a nominee for the Greek International Women’s Awards in the field of Art and Culture. She has broad teaching and mentoring experience. Her research has a special focus on museum learning, art psychotherapy, health and well-being, inclusivity and the various ways that culture can contribute to the efficiency of education and health systems. Her articles are on Academia.edu and Research Gate.
Machunwangliu Kamei
Dr. Machunwangliu Kamei is a postdoctoral from the School of Education and Communication, Jönköping University, Sweden. She is a member of the Communication, Culture and Diversity (CCD) Research Group, the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, the Online Learning Consortium (OLC), and the International Scientific Committee of Humanities and Social Sciences. She was involved in the ‘Teachers for Teachers’ project under Columbia University, New York. Currently, she heads the Department of Film, TV, and New Media at SVKM’s UPG College in Mumbai, India. As a member of educational expert groups such as Global Knowledge Sharing and Learning, eSkills under GiZ (German International Cooperation), the University of the Philippines Open University, and the University of the People, California, she has worked with learners from diverse backgrounds.
Maria Konti
Maria Konti is a transdisciplinary artist, researcher, art psychotherapist and educator, working in between the fields of contemporary art, therapy and philosophy for the last 30 years. Her practice brings together their methodologies, tracing their interconnections. Through designing educational and other collective frameworks, she aims to generate new mechanisms where contemporary art theories, archival studies and philosophical discourses inform therapeutic practices and ways of being together. By attempting to establish those artistic methodologies as equally important with the ones arising from the art psychotherapeutic studies, she aims to find new, interdisciplinary and diverse ways of connecting with one another.
In 2016, she introduced —in collaboration with the School of Fine Art of Athens— an “Art as Therapy” project for Junior High School at The Moraitis School, where she is still working as a teacher. This project particularly focuses in the use of Art Therapy in order to establish and promote inclusion in the school environment in Greece. In 2020 she completed her training as an Art Psychotherapist in the Centre of Art and Psychotherapy (EAP accredited). She is working specifically with adolescents in a clinical and private placement. Beside her private practise she was also a colleague in the Day-Clinic in the “Psychiatric Department of Adolescent and Young Adults” in the General Hospital of G.Gennimatas (Athens). She conceived and coordinated the art-based research Art Psychotherapy workshop that took place at the National Museum of Contmemporary Art ΕΜΣΤ (Athens). That structure, within such a context, became a pioneering research model in Greece, and it was followed as a paradigm by two museum publications. She is a member of the Research Committee of the European Federation of Art Therapy.
