This 2-hour keynote workshop with Cathy Malchiodi introduces a trauma-informed, sensory-based approach to arts therapies grounded in current neuroscience and clinical practice. Drawing on her Restorative Embodiment framework, Malchiodi explores how trauma impacts sensory processing and disrupts the body’s capacity for regulation, presence, and connection.
Participants will be guided through key principles of working with the vestibular, proprioceptive, and interoceptive systems, understanding how these sensory pathways shape emotional experience and recovery. 
Through experiential insights, the workshop highlights how art-making, movement, sound, story-telling can support bottom-up regulation, restore a sense of safety, and re-establish mind–body integration. Rather than focusing on verbal processing alone, this approach emphasizes working with the body’s rhythms, sensations, and impulses as entry points for healing. The session offers practical, adaptable strategies for integrating trauma-informed, sensory-based interventions into clinical, educational, and community settings.
This keynote invites participants to reconsider the role of creative expression in trauma recovery, offering a grounded and accessible framework for supporting resilience, agency, and embodied awareness in their practice.

Learning Objectives
At the end of this workshop, participants will be able to:
1. Describe how trauma impacts sensory processing and the nervous system
2. Identify the role of vestibular, proprioceptive, and interoceptive systems in regulation
3. Apply trauma-informed, sensory-based principles to creative arts therapy practice
4. Integrate art-making as a tool for supporting embodied regulation and mind–body connection

This presentation offers an integrative overview of contemporary approaches to trauma therapy, bridging foundational theory and clinical application. It begins with a brief history of psychotraumatology, highlighting key developments and core findings that have shaped current understanding of trauma and its effects.
The session then reviews evidence-based trauma therapies, with particular attention to recent research on somatic processes and the role of the body in trauma recovery. Building on this, the presentation introduces the principles of emotion-focused therapy as a conceptual bridge toward expressive and creative therapeutic interventions, emphasizing how emotional processing and embodied experience can be supported through non-verbal modalities.
The presentation concludes with a clinical case example, illustrating how these theoretical frameworks can be integrated in practice. Together, these components offer participants a coherent framework for understanding trauma from both cognitive and embodied perspectives, and for exploring connections between established therapeutic models and expressive arts-based approaches.

Learning Objectives
At the end of this presentation, participants will be able to:
1. Describe key historical developments and foundational findings in psychotraumatology
2. Identify evidence-based trauma therapies and explain the role of somatic processes in trauma recovery
3. Explain how principles of emotion-focused therapy can inform expressive and arts-based therapeutic interventions

The diagnosis of cancer and subsequent hospitalization can be deeply traumatic for children and their families, disrupting their sense of time, agency, and emotional stability. Within pediatric onco-hematology units, prolonged treatments and uncertainty often generate states of passivity, hyperactivity, and pervasive anxiety—creating what can be experienced as a “time out of time.”
This vignette presentation introduces a clinical approach to dance/movement therapy (DMT) in this context, grounded in movement analysis frameworks including Laban Movement Analysis (LMA), Bartenieff Fundamentals, and the Kestenberg Movement Profile (KMP). Informed by psychoanalytic and developmental perspectives (Winnicott, Bollas, Stern), the work emphasizes the therapist’s embodied presence—conceptualized as Corpo Ambiente—as a relational and therapeutic medium.
Through a brief clinical illustration of a nine-year old boy case, the vignette highlights how movement, play, and attuned presence can support emotional expression, regulation, and connection within highly medicalized environments.

Learning Objectives
At the end of this presentation, participants will be able to:
1. Describe the psychological and emotional impact of pediatric cancer hospitalization on children and families
2. Apply principles of dance/movement therapy, including movement analysis frameworks and embodied presence (Corpo Ambiente)