Carol Hammal

MY GREATEST ACCOMPLISHMENT: Being able to pioneer and establish the field of art therapy in my home country of Egypt based on formal clinical and academic standards, which we have been lacking in the past years. Art therapy is becoming very popular now in Egypt. I continue to raise awareness about the field’s ethical practices through educational workshops I’ve been offering since 2012, which helped create further interest in pursuing formal training in art therapy as a career. For now, prospective students have to pursue their master’s abroad until we see the day when we have the first graduate art therapy program in Cairo. I also feel very proud that Egypt has now been set on the global art therapy map through my TEDx talk in 2014 and through an official visit by Second Lady of the United States Karen Pence in Cairo in 2018 as part of her initiative “Art Therapy: Healing with the HeART,” which aims to raise awareness about art therapy on a global level.

HOW DREXEL HELPED: Drexel set me apart from day one; its art therapy program is unique and intense. It gave me the most pristine level of education I could ask for along with strong internship opportunities, which bolstered my training foundation by bridging the gap between theory and practice. I had specifically picked Drexel because it was the first graduate art therapy program in the world and it still continues to train generations of art therapists until today. This was definitely a legacy I wanted to be part of and carry on after I moved back to my country, and I hope to one day initiate the same legacy in Egypt.

WHERE I’ll BE IN FIVE YEARS: Hopefully running Egypt’s first graduate art therapy program to train many future art therapists in Egypt and the surrounding region while continuing my work on a revolutionary digital art therapy project that I’ve created and developed in collaboration with Artocene in the United Kingdom.