liff Joseph is a visual artist (painter), art psychotherapist, and community activist. He has taught drawing and painting in adult and adolescent programs for the New York City Board of Education. He was instructor of Psychology of Art (undergraduate), instructor of Art Therapy (undergraduate), and Assistant Professor of Art Therapy in the Graduate Creative Arts therapy Department of the Graduate School of Art and Design at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York; and instructor of Art Therapy (undergradute) at Adelphi University in Garden City, New York. He has served as president of the New York Art Therapists Association; and co-chairman of the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC), an artists' organization created to expose, confront, and eliminate racism and sexism in the arts. Mr. Joseph has given lectures, workshops, and demonstrations at cultural, educational, and religious institutions nationwide, and exhibits his painting and drawings nationally and internationally. He hs served as chairman of the Visual Arts Committee of the Westbeth Artists Residents Council, as director of Westbeth Gallery, as a founding member of Art Against Apartheid, as a memeber of the Board of Advisors of City Arts Workshop, on the Board of Advisors of The Door (an adolescent health center), and as a member of the Board of Elders of the Good Shepherd-Faith Presbyterian Church. All of the foregoing organizations are located in New York City. Mr. Jospeh is a Registered Art therapist and a member of the American Art Therapy Association (AATR).
He is co-author of Murals of the Mind: Image of a Psychiatric Community, a book about art therapy [1973, International Universities Press, Inc.: Madison, CT]; editor and publisher of "Art Therapy and the Third World," the proceedings of a panel discussion which he organized and moderated in its presentation to a conference of the American Art Therapy Association; and author of "Art, Politics, and the Life Force," an essay published by Forward: Journal of Socialist Thought [Spring/Summer 1989].
Mr. Joseph states, "Particularly in view of today's pathological world, the belief that art, religion, and social action are unrelated counter-forces to evil, is dangerously unenlightened. Functioning together, they constitute the means for our transformation, empowerment for our struggle to survive creatively on our planet, and our best opportunity, ultimately, to experience spiritual transcendence as a global community.
Mr. Joseph is married to Ann Joseph. He has three children and one grandchild.
