Re-Authoring Teaching Speakers Bureau

Marie-Nathalie Beaudoin, Ph.D., directs Skills for Kids, Parents & Schools (SKIPS), a 9-month intense narrative therapy, neurobiology, and mindfulness training program in California where she works with children, adults, families, and school communities. Before immersing herself in narrative therapy in the early 1990s, Marie-Nathalie had trained in Human Biology and Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction. She now brings together fields that have influenced her life and work for the last 30 years, and as a result, has pioneered narrative clinical practices to respond to distressing emotions and traumatic experiences. She has written over 50 professional articles and many books, such as the popular The SKiLL-ionaire in Every Child: Boosting Children’s Socio-emotional Skills using the latest in Brain Research (2010), written for parents, teachers, and counselors (French, English, Spanish). She has also co-authored Collaborative Therapies and neurobiology: Evolving practices in action (Beaudoin & Duvall, 2017), and Mindfulness in a busy world: Lowering barriers for youth & adults to cultivate focus, emotional peace & gratefulness (Beaudoin & Maki, 2021). Her latest book, which was co-authored with Gerald Monk and published by WW Norton, is Narrative Practices and Emotions: 40+ Ways to Support the Emergence of Flourishing Identities. It combines her lifelong passion for the immense possibilities inherent to our bodies and brains with novel narrative practices inspired by Interpersonal Neurobiology, Sensorimotor Therapy, and Positive Psychology. With a background in improvisational theater and dance, Marie-Nathalie is well-known for her thought-provoking and engaging presentations

SuEllen Hamkins, MD is a psychiatrist specializing in college mental health and narrative therapy. Her passion is helping people thrive in the face of challenges and difficulties. Her book, The Art of Narrative Psychiatry (Oxford University Press, 2013), offers detailed guidance in resiliency-focused, culturally-attuned, collaborative mental health practice, bringing narrative approaches alive through vivid case reports. As Clinical Assistant Professor at UMass Chan Medical School, she cherishes her role in providing psychotherapy and psychiatric treatment to students, as well as offering psychotherapy supervision. She is a co-founder and co-author of The Mother-Daughter Project. SuEllen has presented at professional conferences around the world.

Sarah Beth Hughes works as a Couple and Family Therapist in Nelson, BC Canada. She was introduced to Narrative ideas through her work as the North American Distributor of Dulwich Publications throughout the 1990’s. She got the privilege of attending many of Michael White’s training and got inspired to do this kind of work herself. Along the way she also met many of Michael’s colleagues and friends including Peggy Sax who have helped her feed her passion for this work.

Charley Lang, LMFT, is co-founder of the Narrative Counseling Center in Los Angeles. As director of the Psychology Concentration at Antioch University, his courses include Queer Counseling & Narrative Practice, Documentary Film & the American Psyche, Madness in American History & Film, and Shakespeare Deconstructed: Gender & Power Play. An avid cyclist, gardener and film buff, Lang is an active member of reauthoringteaching.com, an online resource for narrative therapy students and practitioners around the world. Always on the lookout for new and inspiring alternative stories, Lang produced and directed several acclaimed documentary films, including the HBO award-winning Gay Cops: Pride Behind the Badge.

Poh Lin Lee, MA is a Chinese Malaysian Australian woman who comes to practice from multiple locations - narrative therapy practitioner, social worker, co-researcher of trauma/displacement, writer, teacher, film protagonist, and film/creative consultant. She is committed to practices that involve critically reflecting on values, beliefs, and biases and actively working to eliminate systems that maintain unearned privileges and unjust oppressions. For many years, Poh has created innovative narrative therapy projects and practices regarding family and state violence, displacement (from rights, land, home, body, identity, relationships), liminality, and reclaiming practices of staying with experience and preference. She collaborated on the award-winning film Island of the Hungry Ghosts (2018) with director Gabrielle Brady. Poh is on the teaching faculty of the Dulwich Centre, the teaching faculty & Board of Re-Authoring Teaching; an honorary clinical fellow of the School of Social Work and a lecturer for Film and Television, University of Melbourne; on the International Advisory Committee of the Latin American Journal of Clinical Social Work, the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Narrative Therapy and Community Work and a sessional facilitator for Dokomotive Collective Filmhaus Köln Attagirl DocX Archive Lab International Documentary Association, The Flaherty and The Pritzker Pucker Studio Lab for the Promotion of Mental Health via Cinematic Arts.

Rocio was born in Mexico. As a young child, Rocio migrated to California and lived as an undocumented person in California. Rocio's status and journey as an immigrant have informed her work with communities in California. Rocio has been involved in community work for most of her life. She obtained her master's in counseling in 2006 from San Diego State University and is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in California, She is passionate about questioning colonial practices in mental health and depathologizing mental health practices. For many years, Rocio worked at a non-profit community clinic, helping serve the most marginalized and impoverished communities. She has extensive practice with adolescents, having been a school counselor for 15 years. Rocio also provided short-term therapy for 15 years at an immigrant detention facility. Rocio has provided training, served as an adjunct professor, and supervised and worked with families and children. Helping people on the brink of Suicide and listening to people process sexual assault and trauma has been a focus of her work. Rocio is passionate about using narrative inquiry and practices while she supervises and trains future therapists at a women's substance facility where women are trying to reclaim their lives from substance use. She currently has a private practice and works with youth, their families, and individuals seeking to live a life they prefer. Rocio enjoys time on the beach, baking with her husband and daughters, and walking her dog Sahara.

My ancestry es Muisca, African and South European de Colombia. Como inmigrante en los United States (U.S.), I am a part of the faculty team in the family therapy and Spanglish decolonial healing programs at San Diego State university located in Kumeyay land. Mi trabajo de supervisión, teaching, research, and therapy in my immigrant English are informed by the Australasian narrative therapy and U.S. Black feminism. En my Español Colombiano y Spanglish, I am particularly interested in Andean decoloniality, decolonial feminismos and Chicanx borderland activismo as a response to Eurocentrism. I am a practicing licensed Marriage and Family Therapist en los Estados de California and Texas and Supervisor.

Lynne V. Rosen, LCSW (Pasadena, California) has been engaged in therapeutic work for over 36 years in medical, residential, inpatient, community, and private practice settings. She found her therapeutic and philosophical home in the early 90s when she traveled to New York to hear Michael White and David Epston. During the past several decades, she has focused her attention on integrating somatic-inspired EMDR, Somatic Therapies, and Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB) with a Narrative approach in a way that remains philosophically and ethically aligned. Lynne has worked toward unsettling Western ideologies and practices related to body-based/somatic therapies and ecotherapy, moving toward more inclusive anti-racist and decolonizing practices and cultural somatics. Co-constructing different kinds of scaffolding using sensations, images/visual metaphors, dreams, radical imagination, and memories in less linear ways creates space for greater agency, reclamation, a sense of aliveness, and new possibilities for relating to ourselves, community members, and the other-than-human world. An Embodying Conversations course is in process for Re-Authoring Teaching. Lynne continues to feel passionate about teaching, supervising, and public conversation work, and for many years, she had the privilege of working as Core Faculty and Director of the Postmodern Therapy Training Program at PGI and Co-Founder of WPLA (Women’s Project Los Angeles).

Peggy Sax, PhD (Cornwall, Vermont), is the founder and Executive Director of Re-Authoring Teaching – this global learning community of narrative therapy practitioners, teachers, and enthusiasts. Having apprenticed herself to narrative therapy since the early 1990s, Peggy has worked for several decades in independent practice as a licensed psychologist/family therapist, consultant, teacher and international trainer. Previously, she worked in several innovative public sector programs including birth to three infant development, intensive home-based services, parent child centers, and community mental health. Peggy is the author of several articles and the book, Re-Authoring Teaching: Creating a Collaboratory. Whether online, on-the-road or within her beautiful home state of Vermont, it gives her great joy to bring together favorite people, ideas, and practices – to learn, engage, play, and replenish together.

Kitty Thatcher, MA, is a clinical psychologist born in Australia and currently residing in Chile. She was first introduced to narrative ideas during her Masters in Child and Adolescent Clinical Psychology in Systemic Therapies at the Universidad de Chile and has since engaged in an apprenticeship with David Epston, Tom Carlson and Kay Ingamells which consolidated narrative therapy as her primary therapeutic approach. Kitty has worked with children and adolescents and their families in community health centers and non-government organizations in both rural and urban settings in Australia and Chile. She is particularly drawn to collective practices and has facilitated the creation of groups in which art and poetry serve to connect and embolden others, drawing on the know-how of the ‘anti anorexia league’ to form contemporary counterparts. Her research interests have focused on multiculturalism in therapy, children's experiences of domestic family violence, as well as the practice of 'self-starving', more commonly referred to as disordered eating. She has recently opened a private practice in Santiago, Chile while she continues to dedicate herself to writing projects. In 2024, Kitty joined the Re-authoring Teaching USA as a consultant and proud member of the team.

Akansha Vaswani-Bye, PhD is a licensed counseling psychologist born and raised in Mumbai and currently lives in Seattle. She is a principal faculty member in the SPIRIT (Supporting Psychosis Innovation through Research, Implementation, & Training) Center in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Washington. Her current research and training efforts are focused on developing and supporting the family peer community who care for loved ones living with the effects of problematic psychotic states. She is also an attending psychologist at an HIV primary care clinic located in a public hospital in Seattle. She is leading and co-leading research projects that are adapting a single-session narrative therapy approach aimed at improving access to mental health care among people living with HIV and at risk for HIV in integrated and community-based care settings. As a doctoral scholar, her research focused on the ethical and medical-legal issues that arise in psychiatry due to academic-industry relationships and solutions for reform. She was first introduced to narrative practices when she worked at Ummeed Child Development Center in Mumbai where she was fortunate to learn these ideas from Peggy Sax, Shona Russell, Maggie Carey, and Jehanzeb Baldiwala. She has been a Board Member of Re-Authoring Teaching since 2016.

Navid Zamani, PhD is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist who specializes in supporting Middle Eastern refugees dealing with domestic violence. As a Persian-American based in San Diego, CA, he integrates decolonial poststructural feminism within a narrative therapy framework. Dr. Zamani also serves as a lecturer at San Diego State University and is the Clinical Director at License to Freedom, a nonprofit organization focused on helping Middle Eastern refugees impacted by domestic violence. He provides clinical supervision to a team of therapist trainees at License to Freedom. His research and scholarship emphasizes the role of affect in narrative therapy, working with couples experiencing violence and high conflict, and linguistic justice for multilingual communities.

Larry Zucker is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker in Los Angeles, United States, where he has been practicing family therapy and training therapists for over 30 years. He offers occasional trainings through the Southern California Counseling Center and the Miracle Mile Community Practice (MMCP) and offers supervision through MMCP. He created an online couples therapy course offered through Re-authoring Teaching: Escaping Blame: Helping Couples Develop Account-ability. A chapter about his work with couples is in press in An Encyclopedia of Radical Helping, edited by Chris Hoff and to be published by Thick Press in the fall of 2024. A podcast interview about his couple work with Chris is listed below as well as a brief video presented at the Dulwich Centre’s Meet the Author series.