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Pat B. Allen
Pat B. Allen(born c. 1952) is an author, artist, art therapist, and teacher who is connected to the Creative Source through art, writing, and working in her garden .She is the co-founder of The Open Studio Project and was part of the faculty at the Art Institute of Chicagofor twenty years.

Education background
Allen was born in 1952 in West Orange, New Jersey. She attended Catholic school through her first two years of college and has retained a great fondness for the incense and imagery of the Catholic Church. Allen started studying art in 1973 at the Boston Museum School of Fine Art. After graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree from Tufts University, she went to Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont to start working on a master’s degree in art therapy. At the same time, she began working with clients in a community mental health center. In 1979, Pat converted her faith to Judaism because of her strong interest in a faith that allowed and encouraged arguing with God. After ten years as an art therapist, Allen wrote her Ph.D. dissertation The Power of the Image as a sort of manifesto against what she experienced as the ‘clinification’ of art therapy. After finishing her Ph.D. at Union University in Cincinnati, Allen continued to work with clients and teach at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

Experience
Allen is a traveler and adventurer. She and her husband John traveled to Israel where they lived on Kibbutz Ein Gedi for six months. Allen became adept at traveling into the space where all images reside, what C.G. Jung called the collective unconscious. Eventually making art became her preferred path back and forth between the spiritual and material worlds.

Published Articles
Allen has published a wide variety of articles in professional journals. She has helped propel the art therapy discipline forward through her research, publications, and her experiences as an educator, which makes the study of her training and contributions to the field essential to understanding the meaning of art therapy.

The articles she has published contain a diverse range of information about academic, nonacademic, ethical, and social topics. Allen also has some articles talking about art therapy development tendencies and how to further art therapy’s development. One of the articles explains how art therapists are adapting to the changing culture by incorporating digital media into therapy sessions.Therapists should follow the era and let clients use those technological media creations to express themselves. This may be a good choice for clients who live in modern society. With those developments, Ethical problems are present. She gives examples of how to solve those problems.

Books

 * Art as a Way of Knowing (1995) Boston&London: Shambhala Publications
 * Art is a Spiritual Path (2005) Boston: Shambhala

Studio
In 1995, Allen founded the Open Studio Project on Damen Ave. in Chicago with two former students, Dayna Block and Deborah Gadiel. OSP intended to provide access to art to anyone interested in the creative process.

The opening of OSP coincided with the publication of her first book: Art is a way of knowing. . In this book, Allen mainly talks about image-making artwork as a way of knowing the life of the soul.

Allen’s work began to gain focus in The Open Studio Project. Along with Block and Gadiel she developed a method that consists of forming an intention as a guide to art making, creating from a place of freedom and experimentation, allowing the image to lead by following its energy, and writing and reading a witness to the art alone or in a safe group environment.

After a number of years at OSP Allen felt the need in 2000 for a more spiritually grounded environment and she left OSP (which still functions in Evanston, IL today). She founded Studio Pardes in Oak Park, IL, the town where she lived. There she created and exhibited work and offered workshops on art as a spiritual practice. Allen chose the name "Studio Pardes" because her work has long included the exploration of Jewish themes, images and ideas. Pardes, originally an Aramaic word, in Hebrew means orchard or garden. In the Jewish mystical tradition, it refers to the Garden of Eden. In Kabbalah, the letters of the word refer to the four states of reality. Allen also wanted to seek a sanctuary after a rough time in her life. For a period of time she referred to the work as the Pardes Process, focusing on the spiritual aspects or the Studio Process to make space between herself and the Open Studio Project. However, after several years of working with artists, especially Karla Rindal, Director of Facilitation at the Open Studio Project, on a program to train facilitators in the work, she has returned to calling the work the Open Studio Process.

Allen’s work began to focus in Studio Pardes. The studio process consists of forming an intention as a guide to art making, creating from a place of freedom and experimentation, allowing the image to lead by following its energy, and writing and reading a witness to the art alone or in a safe group environment. The art and writing tasks of the Studio Process access the unlimited potential of the Creative Source, support healing change, and clarify life situations. The core Open Studio Process can be combined with a group or community intention to explore common issues such as our perception of others, visioning community solutions, or creating community celebrations or rituals. During her years at Studio Pardes, Allen did a creative collaboration with West Suburban PADS (a place working with homeless people). This project, called Facing Homelessness, was a community mask-making project that involved hundreds of members of the community, both housed and homeless, in mask making and culminated in an exhibition of one hundred and sevety five masks). During the six years of working together, Allen was gifted with the Studio Process of art- making guided by intention and witness. These are concepts she wrote about in Art as a way of knowing but which became actualized as a reliable creative practice and a form of action meditation.

Allen’s current public home space is her personal website. It contains examples of the various streams of work that she creates. She credits the creative source with assisting her in finding her spiritual calling, art. After moving to Ojai, CA in 2008, Allen began intensive study of nature and has begun to use the Open Studio Process as a way to interact with the natural world. Art making and gardening now co-exist for Allen as complementary means to gain access to the mystery of life and consciousness.

Reference
Book reviews
 * Art as a Way of Knowing (1995) Boston&London: Shambhala Publications, by Allen, P.B.
 * "Technology in Art Therapy: Ethical Challenges" ART THERAPY: Journal of the American Art Therapy Association (2011), Vol.28(4), p165-170, by Allen, P. B., Alders, A. & Beck, L.
 * "Is Art Therapy an Idea or a Profession" ART THERAPY: Journal of the American Art Therapy Association (2000), Vol.17(3), p164, by Allen, P.B.
 * Art is a Spiritual Path (2005) Boston: Shambhala, by Allen, P.B.
 * "Special Issue on Social Action and Advocacy Paradigm in Art Therapy: The Lens of Art Therapy Opens Larger Still" ART THERAPY: Journal of the American Art Therapy Association(2011), Vol.28(2), p48-49, by Allen,P.B.