Founder, Creative Acts
Karin Mellberg
I believe in the power of creative acts to harmonize and evolve systems, and hearts – personal, collective, as well as our systems of care and how we care for ourselves, others, and the world around.
Working Across Worlds
Karin creates, collaborates and advocates at the intersection of arts and health. As a change partner, creative guide and Duke Health-trained Health & Wellbeing Coach, she is honored to work with individuals and groups who are creating, dreaming anew, growing and reaching beyond.
HEALTH & WELLBEING: A CREATIVE ACT
Daily, Karin draws upon arts and aesthetic experiences, and uses inspiring change-making processes to realize her own health and wellbeing. Required to personally navigate knowledge gaps and care disparities common to autoimmune diseases that disproportionately affect women, Karin turned to expanded ways of knowing and affecting wellbeing. The arts, an early childhood love, became a life line. She also immersed herself in the formal study of other systems of knowing - including mindfulness-based stress reduction, energy medicine/Reiki, Tibetan Buddhist compassion-based psychology, and nature-based shamanism. Karin continues to learn and practice across traditions, and collaborate with others. She is a champion of the neuroscience of change, as well as the NueroArts, that help us to prioritize expanded ways of knowing health, self and other.
ARTS + MENTAL WELLBEING
In response to COVID-19 school disruptions, Karin partnered with her sister, Carol Mellberg, MA, LMFT, ATR, to develop and deliver to 5,000 students the arts-based BackTogether!™ program. This innovative mental health prevention program continues to bring arts-based SEL skills building, joy and re-connection to students kindergarten through high school. BackTogether™ selected, International Medical Humanities Conference, Amsterdam, 2022.
CORPORATE CHANGE PARTNER
Karin's business career has always involved change making and imagining What If - starting with her first job in the field of 'Continuous Quality Improvement'. She's led large-scale change management, market development, leadership communications, and employee engagement programs for technology and biotech companies in Silicon Valley. She holds degrees from UCLA, and an MBA from Santa Clara University.
STORYTELLING
Karin better understands herself and the world through story, creating stories (written, visual), and creating opportunities for communities to share stories. She led national health advocacy campaigns as an award-winning documentary storyteller: Stories of Lupus, 1999, WNET-PBS distributed, Time Inc. International Health & Medical Film Competition Award; and Final Pose, A Practice In Dying, 2014, Bend Film Festival Award. She is currently publishing a series of graphic books telling stories at the intersection of arts and health.