Sangeeta Swamy

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Sangeeta Swamy, PhD, LCMHC, MT-BC (she/they) is Associate Professor and Co-Chair of the Integral Counseling Program at the California Institute of Integral Studies. A licensed psychotherapist, Board-Certified Music Therapist, and award-winning violinist, Dr. Swamy received her Master of Arts degree from Naropa University in Transpersonal Psychology with a concentration in Music Therapy, and a PhD in Expressive Arts Therapy from Lesley University. 

Through her research with Indian adults, she developed Culturally Centered Music and Imagery (CCMI), the first music therapy framework of its kind for minoritized clients to access the wisdom and power of the cultural unconscious for support, awareness, and insight. In her private practice, she currently uses CCMI with adolescents and adults to address ethnic identity conflict, acculturative stress, and negotiate intersectional identities. 

As a queer, Indian American educator, Dr. Swamy specializes in socio-culturally responsive pedagogy, scholarship, and supervision, and has published in Music Therapy Perspectives, the New Zealand Journal of Music Therapy, and in peer reviewed chapters. She is currently the co-editor of the 2nd edition of The Handbook of Music Therapy, and guest co-editor of a special issue in Music Therapy Perspectives on social justice, both to be published in 2022. She has also lectured nationally and internationally and was keynote speaker for the New Zealand Music Therapy Association National Conference and the Institute of Therapy through the Arts National Conference.  

She is currently a Level III advanced trainee in the Bonny Method of Guided Imagery and Music, and has also studied shamanism with the Foundation for Shamanic Studies and with the Power Path. She is an experienced meditator and maintains a daily two-hour Vipassana practice in the tradition of S.N. Goenka. She also practices astanga yoga and has studied with Richard Freeman and K. Pattabhi Jois, incorporating multiple wisdom and ancestral traditions in her clinical work and pedagogy.

Title of Presentation: The power of lived experience in music therapy research, practice, and scholarship

Sangeeta Swamy