Using Art to Anchor Journeys of Resiliency
In this episode of Resiliency Within, Elaine Miller-Karas interviews Cathy Salser about a deceptively simple proposition: that time and connection — not paint or canvas — can be one of the most powerful art supplies we have.
Cathy is the founder of A Window Between Worlds (AWBW), a non-profit dedicated to nurturing art-based journeys of transforming trauma. Since 1991, AWBW has grown into a national circle of co-creation reaching nearly 150,000 participants annually across 44 states and 8 countries.
She shares the orgins of how she came to this work, and what it looks like when art becomes a circle of co-creation where every person is welcomed as an innovator and a founder of their own path forward. She draws on stories from across her 35 years of practice — from the personal level to the relational, organizational, and national.
She is also honest about what art is not: it doesn’t replace therapists, hotlines, or economic justice. But it does something that nothing else does — it can help people create quick, but lasting, tangible tools to hold onto their strength, vision, and one another across time.
Cathy shares from a very personal place. Her home burned in the Palisades fire, along with her studio and 35 years of AWBW archives. The spirit of that work is not defeated — it is sprouting back up, even through this conversation.
This conversation welcomes us to rethink what art is and what it can do — not as a luxury or a talent, but as an accessible scaffold for change that anyone can build a life around.
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About Our Guest:
Cathy Salser is a social practice artist and the founder of A Window Between Worlds (AWBW), a non-profit dedicated to nurturing art-based journeys of transforming trauma. She holds time and connection as her primary art media — co-creating and mentoring site-specific works that welcome people to crystallize leadership in the face of challenge, sustain action over time, and replace isolation with community.
In this too-busy world, she loves the magic of art practices that are super quick yet super lasting — practices that disrupt and divest from legacies of trauma, and invite space for something new.
Since founding AWBW in 1991, Cathy has nurtured a circle of co-creators that today includes 600+ active community sites, reaching nearly 150,000 participants annually across 44 states and countries including Australia, Canada, Cameroon, Guam, Malawi, Mexico, South Korea, and Venezuela — engaging hundreds of thousands of adults and children who've experienced domestic violence, homelessness, incarceration, sexual assault, and intergenerational trauma.
She's been nationally recognized with the Women's Caucus for Art President's Award, the Bank of America Local Heroes Award, the LA Domestic Violence Council's Betty Fisher Award, and the CA Partnership to End Domestic Violence's Karen Cooper Lifetime Achievement Award.
Cathy is dedicated to living art as a brave and vulnerable practice — a catalyst for interactive journeys transforming trauma that lives in our bodies, relationships, communities, and systems.