ARTIST ROSTER - MIXED MEDIA

Alicia V. Fahr, PhD, LPC

Minneapolis

I have been working with older adults for over 10 years. I graduated from Western Michigan University with a clinical counseling specialty in gerontology. I have worked with seniors in assisted living, nursing homes, rehabilitation, and hospice settings. I have experience providing spiritual counseling, psychotherapy, advocacy services, and art therapy to older adults. I have also provided family counseling to the families of my aging clients. My passion for working with older adults grew out of my own challenges with my aging parents.

I currently provide counseling and advocacy services to older adults and their families. I also design and teach gerontology courses at Capella University. My primary responsibility at the university is to train human service professionals to work effectively and compassionately with older adults. The main focus of my work, whether it is therapeutic, educational, or artistic is to meet the special needs of seniors and enrich their lives with art, music, spirituality, creativity, imagination, and counseling.

Over the last 10 years of my work history with older adults, I have not identified a therapeutic approach that is more enlightening, healing, and spiritual than art. I am completing an art therapy program at Adler Graduate School and have been providing art therapy to older adults and their families for 3 years. I wish to continue my art therapy work with seniors and their caregivers to provide an avenue of individual expression, creativity, inspiration, hope, and the celebration of life in old age. In this manner, I feel that I would be assisting seniors with acquiring worth, dignity and self-respect.