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Marisol Norris
Dr. Marisol Norris is a Jamaican-American music therapist, educator, scholar-activist, researcher, and cultural worker born in Jamaica in 1983. She is the founder and CEO of the Black Music Therapy Network, Inc., owner of Aesthetic Healing, LLC , and Director of the Music Therapy and Counseling Masters Program at Drexel University. A leading scholar of Black aesthetics in music therapy, Dr. Norris' work centers on musical placemaking and health in Black communities. She teaches internationally on the liberatory function of artistic processes, expanding the applied use of radical healing frameworks across practice settings and featured in Rolling Stone and Vogue for her work with artists' community-based care initiatives and centering minoritized voices across music and health.

After receiving bachelor's degrees in Psychology and Vocal Performance and Pedagogy from Historically Black College and University, Oakwood College, she relocated to Philadelphia, PA, and obtained master's and doctoral degrees in Creative Arts Therapies at Drexel University. Her professional and supervisory experience has spanned medical and community health settings, including work in acute psychiatric care, trauma and loss, addictions, familial ruptures and repairs, and organizational systems, profoundly deepening her commitment to healing justice and dismantling relational and structural violence through community-based advocacy, education, healing, and action.

Dr. Norris co-labors with communities to facilitate justice-oriented arts and health initiatives and community-based care, including the Philadelphia-based project, Lyric & Flow: Songwriting through Trauma, and esperanza spalding's Grammy Award-winning project, Songwrights Apothecary Lab. Additionally, she is a core organizing member of the Critical Pedagogies in Arts Therapies Alliance (a transdisciplinary BIPOC initiative that works to transform education and research across arts therapies disciplines), co-founder of the BIPOC Student Fund by Black Arts Therapies Educators providing immediate need-based assistance for BIPOC arts therapy students, and co-founder of the Music Therapy Justice and Equity Research Mentorship Program supporting emerging researchers' critical scholarship. Dr. Norris has contributed to extensive anti-racist work in the American Music Therapy Association (AMTA), holding regional and national office, and is currently a member of AMTA's Commission on the Education and Training of 21st Century Music Therapists, tasked to vision equitable future for music therapy education and the profession in the US.

Over the past thirteen years, Dr. Norris has developed diverse research and community partnerships centering on the health, well-being, and safety of Black and Brown communities. She utilizes qualitative and arts-based research approaches to explore the discursive construction of race, gender, sexuality, and class in education and clinical practice settings and emancipatory research that support agented portrayals of Black service recipients' health practices across chronic illness and mental health, and eliminates inequities within Black communities. She has contributed to federally-funded qualitative and mixed methods studies on therapeutic programming and technology-based health literacy within low-resourced, Black communities and developed fiscal strategies to support organizational funding initiatives. These activities have fostered long-term professional relationships with content experts and arts and health organizations, facilitating multi-site research and institutional partnerships.

Her current scholarship centers on aesthetics as an embodied meaning-making process within Black life, exploring the effects of societal trauma on Black workers and service users across multiple domains, culturally sustaining practices to support community needs, and radical healing frameworks evident through the discursive analysis of race, gender, class, and sexuality. Dr. Norris' recent book chapter, "...& the Fields: Remembering the Hinterlands in Music & Health," co-written with esperanza spalding in Renee Flemings' anthology, Music and Mind: Harnessing the Arts for Health and Wellness and co-edited publication, "Black Aesthetics & the Arts Therapies," demonstrates this work as "theory in the flesh" and the deliberate care in bringing margins to the center.

Edited Books
Colonialism and Music Therapy Interlocutors. (2022). Colonialism & Music Therapy: Dialogues. Barcelona Publishers.

Book Chapters
Norris, M. & spalding, e. (2024). …& the Fields: Re-membering the Hinterlands Across Music and Health. In R. Fleming (Ed.), Music and mind: Harnessing the arts for health and wellness. Penguin Random House.

Norris, M. (2021). me: a personal and professional necessity. In S. Hadley (Ed.), Sociocultural Identities in Music Therapy (pp. 32-56). Barcelona Publishers.

Norris, M. & Hadley, S. (2019). Engaging race in music therapy supervision. In M. Forinash (Ed.), Music Therapy Supervision (2nd ed.) (pp. 101-126). Barcelona Publishers.

Edited Periodicals
Norris, M., Williams, B., & Gipson, L. (Guest Editors), Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy, (2021). Special Multidisciplinary Issue on Black Aesthetics & the Arts Therapies. https://doi.org/10.15845/voices.v21i1

Editorials & Invited Commentaries
Norris, M., Williams, B., & Gipson, L. (2021). Black aesthetics: Upsetting, undoing, & uncanonizing the arts therapies. [Editorial] Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy, 21(1), 2. https://doi.org/10.15845/voices.v21i1.3287

Thomas, N. & Norris, M. (2021).“Who you mean ‘we’?”: Confronting professional notions of belonging in music therapy. [Commentary]. Journal of Music Therapy, 58(1), 5–11. https://doi.org/10.1093/jmt/thaa024

Norris, M. (2020). Freedom dreams: What must die in music therapy to preserve human dignity?. [Commentary]. Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy, 20(3), 4. https://doi.org/10.15845/voices.v20i3.3172

Gipson, L., Williams, B., & Norris, M. (2020). Three Black women’s reflections on COVID-19 and creative arts therapies. [Commentary]. Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy, 20(2). https://doi.org/10.15845/voices.v20i2.3115

Peer Reviewed Articles
Gipson, L., Norris, M., Amaral, L., Tesfaye, J., & Hiscox, A. ( 2021). What are you all going to do to keep Black women in art therapy? Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy, 21(1), 13. https://doi.org/10.15845/voices.v21i1.3200

Dunn, A., Gipson, L., & Norris, M. ( 2021). Black music matters & The Black Messiah album: An interview with Adrian Dunn. Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy, 21(1), 12. https://doi.org/10.15845/voices.v21i1.3291

Norris, M. (2020). A call for radical imagining: Exploring anti-Blackness in the music therapy profession. Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy, 20(3), 6. https://doi.org/10.15845/voices.v20i3.3167

Norris, M. (2019). Between Lines: A critical multimodal discourse analysis of Black aesthetics in a Vocal Music Therapy group for chronic pain (Doctoral dissertation). Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA.

Fleisher, L., Erkoboni, D., Halkyard, K., Sykes, E., Norris, M. S., Walker, L., & Winston, F. (2017). Are mHealth interventions to improve child restraint system installation of value? A mixed methods study of parents. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 14(10), 1122. https://doi:10.3390/ijerph14101122

Bradt, J., Norris, M., Shim, M., Gracely, E. J., & Gerrity, P. (2016). Vocal music therapy for chronic pain management in inner-city African Americans: A mixed methods feasibility study. Journal of Music Therapy, 53(2), 178. https://doi.org/10.1093/jmt/thw004

Hadley, S., & Norris, M. (2016). Musical multicultural competency in music therapy: The first step. Music Therapy Perspectives, 34(2), 129-137. https://doi.org/10.1093/mtp/miv045

Further Print & Recorded Features

 * 1) Marisol Norris' Official Website
 * 2) Voices of the Movement Rolling Stones
 * 3) So Curious! The Franklin Institute "Sound Medicine: Music and Mental Health"
 * 4) 2022 Sound Health Network's Renew/Remix Concert
 * 5) 2022 Sound Health Network's Renew/Remix Submit - Signal Boost: Equity & Access in Music & Wellness
 * 6) Black Aesthetics and the Arts Therapies Special Issue Live Talk
 * 7) esperanza spalding Songwrights Apothecary Lab - Formwela 8
 * 8) esperanza spalding Songwrights Apothecary Lab - Formwela 11
 * 9) esperanza spalding & The Songwrights Apothecary Lab: conversation & shareback