ROOM Gala 2024: What Sustains Us
We welcome you to attend Gala 2024, celebrating our eighth year of harnessing psychoanalytic thought for community action.
Please join us on July 18, 2024, at 8 pm EDT via Zoom for an evening of reflection, connection, and inspiration as we celebrate how creativity, community, and introspection sustain and inspire us through challenging times.
This hour of communal celebration will feature a special fireside chat with 2024 honoree Dr. Bandy X. Lee and presentations by ROOM contributors Mohamad Kebbewar, Francesca Schwartz, Ryan LaMothe, Eugene Mahon, Alberto Minujin, and Sara Mansfield Taber.
If you prefer to support directly via check, please make it payable to ROOM: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action and mail to ROOM: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action, 156 W 86th St, Ste 1A, New York, NY 10024.
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2024 Honoree: Bandy X. Lee
Bandy X. Lee, MD, MDiv, is a forensic psychiatrist who taught at Yale School of Medicine and Yale Law School for seventeen years before changing affiliations to Harvard Medical School. She has consulted globally and nationally on violence prevention and prison reform. She has an extensive publication record, including opinion editorials, peer-reviewed articles and chapters, and nineteen edited books, including the New York Times bestseller The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President (Macmillan, 2017; 2019). She is also the author of the textbook Violence (Wiley-Blackwell, 2019), Profile of a Nation: Trump’s Mind, America’s Soul (World Mental Health Coalition, 2020), and most recently, The Psychology of Trump Contagion: An Existential Threat to American Democracy and All Humankind (World Mental Health Coalition, 2024). In 2021, she cofounded the Violence Prevention Institute, and has now been invited to look at reforming the entire New York State prison system. She does clinical work in correctional and public-sector settings.
Presenters
Mohamad Kebbewar was born and raised in Aleppo. Immigrating to Canada at age 19, Kebbewar earned a degree in history from Concordia University before becoming a graphic designer. He recently published a chapbook with Grey Borders Books entitled Children of War. He is putting the final touches on his novel, The Bones of Aleppo.
Ryan LaMothe is a professor of pastoral care and counseling at Saint Meinrad Seminary and School of Theology in Southern Indiana. He has published in the areas of political philosophy/theology, psychoanalysis, and psychology of religion. His most recent work is A Radical Political Theology for the Anthropocene Era (Cascade Press, 2021), and he is currently working on a monograph for Routledge Press titled A Political Psychoanalysis for the Anthropocene Era: The Fierce Urgency of Now.
Eugene Mahon, MD, is a training and supervising psychoanalyst at Columbia Psychoanalytic Center for Training and Research. He has published three books—A Psychoanalytic Odyssey, Rensal the Redbit, and Boneshop of the Heart—and numerous articles on psychoanalysis. He practices in New York City. Eugene is ROOM’s first poetry editor.
Alberto Minujin is a professor at the New School University, New York. Minujin is the founding executive director of Equity for Children/Equidad para la Infancia, a nonprofit working to improve living conditions for deprived children (equityforchildren.org). A UNICEF senior officer from 1990 to 2005, Minujin is a mathematician with training in applied statistics and demography. From 2013 to 2018 Minujin served on the Board of Comparative Research on Poverty (CROP), a scientific committee at the University of Bergen. He has authored volumes, including Leaving No Children and No Adolescents Behind, Ibidem (2021), Tackling Child Poverty in Latin America, CROP-Ibidem (2017),Global Child Poverty and Well-Being, Policy Press (2012). In 2010, Minujin was awarded the Bicentennial Medal by the government of Argentina in recognition of his decades-long work on behalf of the world’s most impoverished children and adolescents.
Francesca Schwartz, PhD, is a New York based artist and psychoanalyst. Schwartz’s work rests on her fascination with the contents and materials that make up the body. Originally working in bone, her work has expanded to include paint, wax, metal, found objects and textiles, finding expression in collage and assembled works. Schwartz is the art editor of ROOM: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action.
Sara Mansfield Taber is the author of the memoir Black Water and Tulips: My Mother, The Spy’s Wife and the award-winning Born Under an Assumed Name: The Memoir of a Cold War Spy’s Daughter. She has also published two books of literary journalism and the writing guides To Write the Past: A Memoir Writer’s Companion and Chance Particulars: A Writer’s Field Notebook. Her many essays and reviews have appeared in publications such as the American Scholar and the Washington Post. A practicing social worker and psychologist with a specialty in cross-cultural human development, she has coached writers and led writing workshops at universities and literary centers and for a wide variety of communities for the past three decades. For many years she offered writing workshops at New Directions, a program for psychoanalysts. Five years ago, to help stressed professionals working in the refugee assistance and health care fields, she designed “Writing for Resilience” workshops, and for the past two years she has been facilitating writing workshops to support the mental health and creativity of young Afghan women both within Afghanistan and abroad.
Participating Hosts
Elizabeth Cutter Evert is the community projects editor for ROOM. As a founding member of the project, she is also on the Editorial Board and co-leads the ROOM Roundtable. A fellow at IPTAR, she is in private practice in New York City.
Elizabeth Kandall, PhD, MFA, is a psychologist and psychoanalyst in private practice. She is a poetry editor at ROOM: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action.
Brent Matheny (he/him) is currently a PhD student in Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. He is the managing editor of ROOM: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action.
Hattie Myers, PhD, is a Training and Supervising psychoanalyst at IPTAR. She is the editor in chief at ROOM: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action.
Isaac Slone is a psychoanalytic candidate at the Contemporary Freudian Society in New York City. He is the director of programming of ROOM: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action and co-host of Voices from ROOM podcast.
Aneta Stojnić, PhD, is a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City and co-director of the Child and Adolescent Program at IPTAR. She is an editor at ROOM: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action, and co-host of Voices From Room podcast.