Watch the overview of Dr Carla’s new online Creative Arts Therapy inspired wellbeing course:

“Foundations of Creative Wellbeing”

Meet Dr Carla van Laar

Carla is an Artist and Creative Arts Therapist based in Boon Wurrung Country, Inverloch, Victoria. She brings decades of experience working with people and the arts for well-being in community, justice, health, education and private practice contexts. Carla has lived experience as the parent of a child with disabilities and a life limiting condition, and it was during her beloved son Vaughn’s life that she was introduced to the life enhancing potential of creative arts therapies. She has worked with people to support health and wellbeing through the arts since 1991 and continues this supportive work today in her Inverloch based Art Therapy studio.

Experiential ways of knowing underpin Carla’s therapeutic work, including embodied attunement and arts-based responding, informed by trauma-centred, strengths-based, existential and narrative approaches. She loves to share creative practices as ways of knowing and being.

Carla’s book Bereaved Mother’s Heart (2007) broke social taboos about maternal grief. Seeing her Stories (2020) presents Carla’s research into making Women’s stories visible through art. Her most recent publication is “Art Therapy First Aid: Growing Capacity with Art Therapists in Communities Affected by Australian Bushfires”(in Scarce, J. (Ed.) 2022).

An educator in the field of Creative Art Therapy since 2001, Carla received an Artist Fellowship at RMIT’s creative research lab, “Creative Agency” in 2018. She is a lead campaigner in the ACTivate Arts Therapy collective, and Founding Director of the Creative Mental Health Forum.

Carla insists on being part of a creative revolution in which art re-embodies lived experience, brings us to our senses, makes us aware of the interconnectedness of all life and is an agent of social change.

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