Faculty Spotlight | Juanita Kiff
Juanita Kiff, BSc, DKATI, RCAT, is an avid painter and clinician who offers mental health and substance counselling and art therapy services primarily focused on Indigenous populations. She is devoted to the preservation of traditional knowledge, the use of traditional healing methods and all efforts toward mending our relationship with the Earth. She facilitates workshops and healing circles and offers clinical and art therapy supervision. Her work is grounded by ethical, cultural, and spiritual sensitivity from an ancestral trauma-informed and anti-oppressive approach. Juanita is a Kutenai Art Therapy Institute graduate (2013) and holds a Bachelor of Science in Public Communications from the University of Idaho (2004). Juanita celebrates the creative and playful spirit in each of us and our endless capacity for change and healing.
Interview
What excites you right now in your teaching role?
The opportunity to inspire collective healing for marginalized individuals and populations, which I believe, starts from within. We are all each other’s teachers and am excited for what each student brings to the table from their unique life experiences. I’m also excited about arts-based activism as a method for social justice and encouraging others to be change agents, to take a stand for human rights, and to celebrate and protect our mother Earth.
What is your personal pedagogy?
My personal pedagogy is centered around the five R's of Indigenous research: Relationship, respect, relevance, responsibility, and reciprocity. I believe that developing trusting relationships in a nurturing and collaborative environment is the gateway to learning. I want to foster critical thinking, creativity, confidence, opportunities for group work, cooperation, collaboration, risk taking, social responsibility, and effective communication in my courses. I value and utilize a variety of different learning resources and methods particularly experiential learning.
Why did you choose to teach at KATI?
I chose to teach at KATI because I believe it is an art therapist’s responsibility and obligation to do their own “work” in personal therapy before entering the field. Personal art therapy experience and personal process is fundamental to the training at KATI. At KATI students are asked to complete two years of art therapy training group in which they engage with their own therapeutic process. In addition to the training group experience, students are required to participate in arts-based education and self-reflective processes daily throughout their course work. The value of this learning is immeasurable and essential to the work as a professional art therapist.