Rewriting Memory: What Neuroscience and Psychotherapy Reveal About Healing – Film Screening See Memory with Panel Discussion

Viviane Silvera is a pioneering neuroarts filmmaker and painter whose work integrates psychology, trauma science, and hand-painted animation. She is the creator of SEE MEMORY, the Telly Award–winning documentary composed of more than 30,000 painted frames visualizing the neuroscience of memory formation and reconsolidation. Silvera’s work has been commissioned for Art Basel Miami and Berlin Art Week; her portrait of President Bill Clinton is held in the Clinton Presidential Library, and her public sculpture The Fault was created for Vanderbilt University. She received the Edward Hopper House Award of Excellence in Painting, will anchor the 2026 NeuroArts exhibition at the Honolulu Museum of Art, and recently keynoted Tufts University’s Neuroscience Day.

Sophia Michelen, MPH is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, photojournalist, and global health advocate whose work spans the intersections of memory, identity, trauma, and justice – currently the producer of See Memory. Trained in neuroscience and public health, Michelen has worked across more than 80 countries with institutions including the United Nations World Food Programme, UNICEF, and Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Public Health. Her work has been featured in National Geographic Traveller, Forbes, Teen Vogue, and Ms. Magazine, and exhibited at Harvard University and the International Center of Photography. She recently served as a Researcher-in-Residence on an Arctic expedition studying the psychological and cultural impacts of climate change on Inuit communities, and she co-hosts the PBS series America: The Land We Live In. Based in New York City, her work centers the ethical responsibility of witnessing—and how the way we remember shapes how we heal.

Robert Irwin Wolf, DPsa, LP is a licensed creative art therapist and psychoanalyst in New York City, a photographer, and sculptor. At Pratt Institute he majored in sculpture and photography as an undergraduate and then as a graduate student in art therapy. Later, he trained as a psychoanalyst at the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis (NPAP), followed by earning a Doctor of Psychoanalytic Studies degree at The Parkmore Institute. In 2019 he was promoted to Professor Emeritus at the College of New Rochelle, after teaching graduate art and art therapy for 40 years. He was Director of the Institute for Expressive Analysis in New York City for three terms and was a past president of the New York Art Therapy Association. His travel photography has won international awards. His training, teaching, and clinical experience led him to integrate these creative areas in clinically unique ways, and he has published on this integrative work. His stone and wood sculptures are a blend of figurative and abstract elements. Each piece is intrinsic to human experience and is perceived on an unconscious level. For him, art should communicate on a deeply visceral level and profoundly resonate with a viewer.

Penny Rosen, MSW, LCSW, BCD-P NY Area Co-Chair, Past-President, AAPCSW. Faculty and Board Member, NPAP, NY Inst for Psychoanalytic Self Psychology. Recipient, Distinguished Practitioner, NAP; AAPCSW Lifetime Achievement Award (2021). Reviewer, CSWJ. Private Practice, New York, NY.