Luisa Boada is a Colombian clinical psychologist who has worked in clinical settings in Colombia, the USA, and the UK with people from diverse backgrounds. Her clinical work focuses primarily on war trauma and gender-based violence. She currently works at a refuge with survivors of domestic abuse and sexual violence from Latin American and other ethnic minorities. Her clinical work is informed by psychoanalytic approaches and uses intersectional, community, and de-colonial feminism as essential cornerstones of her practice.
Luisa is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Multicultural and Interdisciplinary Inquiry – Health Humanities Centre at University College London. Her research focuses on developing a musical model of the mind that critically revises psychological development. She uses a multidisciplinary methodology that includes contributions from fields such as neuroscience, evolutionary biology, psychoanalysis, musicology, phenomenology, queer, and feminist studies to support her hypothesis that psychic development is a musical phenomenon.
Her main interests include the role of creativity in healing; psychoanalytic theory; developmental theories; medical, critical, feminist, and queer musicology; phenomenology and poststructuralism; critical and decolonial psychology and psychiatry. In addition to her academic interests, Luisa is engaged in social and cultural movements of the Latin American diaspora, believing that the arts are a powerful vehicle of emancipation and transformation (her special focus is on music and film).
Luisa has participated in interdisciplinary group psychotherapy that combines the arts and critical community psychology (e.g. theatre, music-making, and drawing). The power of combined methodologies to tackle human vulnerabilities has the potential to transform and voice the experiences of people who have experienced trauma whilst connecting with communities going through similar circumstances in safe and containing spaces. The role of creativity enhances the possibilities for expressing experiences at emotional registers that are difficult to retrieve otherwise. Creativity and the arts present a vehicle for healing and transformation.