“The wholeness” that is the field of Expressive Arts,
like Beauty and yet held by and within the threads of Beauty has the capacity to inspire and
engage humanity through relationality, interdependence and generativity. (MPutera 2024)
About mary
Mary has taught and provided supervision for graduate students in Nepal, Nicaragua and Canada, and provided professional supervision for Mental Health professionals and Expressive Arts therapists located across the US, Europe, and other countries including Australia, and Egypt. Mary now serves as Core Faculty for Lesley University in the Mental Health and Wellness Division. She also continues to support Masters and Doctoral Students attending the European Graduate School: Arts, Health and Transformation Division.
Mary’s clinical experience includes many years of private practice, Dual Diagnosis care, support of people experiencing marginalization, Emergency Services, Community Mental Health centers, Spiritual Direction and community healing with Indigenous and settler people in Alaska.
Mary brings the capacity for creative play and arts-based explorations that engage the senses, intuition and emotional awareness as a way of exploring the work we engage as Mental Health ExART Professionals. Curiosity, wonder and the imagination guide the work of forming something new, interesting and expansive. This is where beauty and joy meet us in the unfolding of ourselves, our work, and our world.
Mary has a PhD in Expressive Arts and Social Transformation; CAGS: Arts Education and Leadership; MDiv.; MA Psychology; Certified Mediator (Cambridge Mediation Society), Leadership Cert. MIT U-Lab. Mary is a certified Supervision provider for the REAT certification with IEATA.
Publications
“Accompanied,” Kosmos Journal, Volume 25, Issue 4, 2025
Dissertation
Seeking Beauty As a Core Human Quality: Artfully Awakening our Humanity (2024)
Abstract
This dissertation is an intermodal, interdisciplinary, arts-based, exploration of seeking Beauty as a core human quality, through sensory-centered, communal art practice. Philosophically, this inquiry considers the implications of how we position ourselves in our life-world with Beauty and how seeking Beauty shapes our “being” in the world. Phenomenologically, this inquiry explores what discoveries may form when human beings and Beauty connect and what influence this connection wields in our lives. As an Arts-Based Research this inquiry asks: “What is the experience we have when seeking Beauty in theme close, sensory-centered community art-making.” The architecture of an art-making session as practiced and documented by Dr. Paolo Knill will guide the unfolding of this work while being shaped by Liberationist pedagogy, and the integrated praxis of the social theory of “Presencing,” Critical Arts-Based research, and Post-intentional Phenomenology. I approach this entire project from a womanist perspective firmly committed to holding inclusive, intercultural experiences fostering spaces of shared dignity, diversity and peace. I am curious to learn what happens when we seek Beauty as an essential motivating and integrative force within and between individuals, communities and societies, and between human beings and the constructed, natural, and spiritual world.