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Art Can Heal tells the remarkable story of the pioneering Icelandic artist and art therapist, Sigríður Björnsdóttir. From 1952 she developed methods to help children in hospitals experience, explore, and express their thoughts and emotions through art. Sigríđur’s vision was that children should be given opportunities to experience unrestricted visual creativity, free play, and spontaneous expression to encourage the natural evolution of their character. Art Can Heal is an attempt by visual artist Ágústa Oddsdóttir to describe and share with the world the impact and magic that art therapy with Sigríđur had on her life. Art Can Heal also includes interviews with Sigríður by curator Hans Ulrich Obrist and visual artist Egill Sæbjörnsson.

Sigríđur Björnsdóttir is an Icelandic artist and pioneer of art therapy. She was born in 1929 at Flaga in Skaftártunga, South Iceland, and currently lives and works in Reykjavík. From 1957 to 1964 she was married to the Swiss German artist Dieter Roth. They had 3 children together, who all currently live and work in Reykjavik. In 1952, she graduated as an artist and art teacher from the Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts, pursuing an independent and interdisciplinary path within the realms of art and therapy. She started to develop her unique method to help sick children explore and express themselves through art when she worked as an intern at children’s hospitals in London and Copenhagen during the summers of 1952 to 1957. She was hired as the founding Head of Creative Therapy at the Paediatric Department of the National University Hospital, later the Icelandic Children's Hospital, in Reykjavík from 1957 to 1973. That autumn she was hired at St Joseph's Hospital, Reykjavík, providing art therapy along with more general tuition at the elementary level until 1996. During her career, Sigríður became sought after worldwide to lecture and curate exhibitions about her groundbreaking therapy work with children at international congresses in, for example, Los Angeles, Buenos Aires, Sao Paolo, Chicago, Melbourne, New Dehli, Manila, and Athens.

Sigríður instigated and organized the first Nordic congress on art therapy in Reykjavík 1975 and she was in active communication with other pioneers of art therapy like Edith Kramer (New York), Rita Simon (Belfast), and Kati Bondestam (Helsinki). She also collaborated intensively with the Hospital Organisation for Pedagogues in Europe (HOPE) and The International Society of Education through Art (INSEA) founded by UNESCO. She was one of the founders of the Nordic Association for the Needs of Sick Children, NOBAB. She also tutored future art therapists in Scandinavia and Britain until 2006. The book Art Can Heal tells the story of her remarkable work written by visual artist Ágústa Oddsdóttir as an attempt to share the magic that art therapy with Sigríđur had on her life.

The book Art Can Heal is written by visual artist Ágústa Oddsdóttir as an attempt to share the magic that she experienced while attending art therapy with Sigríđur Björnsdóttir. Born in 1947, Ágústa is currently based between Reykjavík, Kjós, and Berlin. Having built a career as a sociology teacher and translator for 15 years, in 1988 she began attending art therapy workshops with Sigríður Björnsdóttir as a way to work through her creative and emotional exhaustion. These sessions inspired Ágústa to study art education at the Iceland College of Education, and then attend The Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts (now Iceland University of the Arts), graduating in 1997 at the age of 50. Ágústa’s way into art has been based on her work and experience with Sigríđur Björnsdóttir and aims at expressing her emotions and memories, recycling, and the views of the different generations of the 20th and 21st century

Abigail Ley, MD, MA, is an American board-certified physician in Paediatrics, Child Neurology, and Neurodevelopmental Disabilities who currently specializes in the diagnosis and medical management of children with neurodevelopmental disorders at Nicklaus Children’s Health System in Florida. She completed her undergraduate degree at Scripps College in Claremont, California with a dual major in Art History and French. Abigail was also a Fulbright scholar in India and obtained an MA degree in Art History from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, United Kingdom. She then attended Indiana University School of Medicine and completed her residency and fellowship training at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, DC.

Egill Sæbjörnsson is a visual artist, musician, and architecture interventionist born in 1973 in Iceland and currently based in Berlin. He has been making artworks that bring together 3D environments, digital projections, technology, and sound since the 1990s. These range from small intimate installations in museum and gallery settings to larger-scale permanent architectural installations. Sæbjörnsson conceives his work as a technological continuation of painting and sculpture, exploring the space between the virtual and physical. His work is playful and humorous but always probes deeper ontological and philosophical questions. Sæbjörnsson gives regular performance lectures in which he explores the theoretical underpinnings of his practice. Sæbjörnsson’s works have been exhibited in The Martin Gropius Bau, Royal College of Art London, PS1 MoMA New York, The Watermill Center, Museum of Modern Art Sydney, Museum of Contemporary Art Seoul, Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea Roma, The Hamburger Bahnhof Berlin, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Amos Rex Museum, Moderna Museet Stockholm, Oi Futuro Rio de Janeiro, Biennale Dakar, and The National Gallery of Prague. He represented Iceland at The 57th Biennale Arte in Venice, and in 2019 he was nominated for the Ars Fennica Art Prize in Finland.

Hans Ulrich Obrist, born 1968 in Zurich, Switzerland, is Artistic Director of the Serpentine Galleries in London, Senior Advisor at LUMA Arles, and Senior Artistic Advisor at The Shed in New York. Prior to this, he was the Curator of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Since his first show, “World Soup” (The Kitchen Show) in 1991, he has curated more than 350 shows. Obrist’s recent publications include Ways of Curating (2015), The Age of Earthquakes (2015), Lives of the Artists, Lives of Architects (2015), Mondialité (2017), Somewhere Totally Else (2018), The Athens Dialogues (2018), Maria Lassnig: Letters (2020), Entrevistas Brasileiras: Volume 2 (2020), and Remember Nature (2021).