An interview with Sharon Chaiklin

Abstract

Sharon Chaiklin has been a dance therapy clinician in the Baltimore, Maryland area for 20 years. She works at Gundry Hospital, maintains a private practice and teaches and supervises for the Dance/Movement Therapy Program at Goucher College. Following her marriage, the birth of four children and several geographic moves, Sharon studied with Marian Chace in 1964 at St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C. In 1966 she helped form the American Dance Therapy Association. She served as its vice president for two years under Chace's presidency. She was then elected president of ADTA, serving in that capacity for four years. Her article, “Dance Therapy,” included in a 1975 edition of theAmerican Journal of Psychiatry, was one of the first in the field to outline a theoretical foundation for the profession and continues to be one of the most comprehensive statements available. Films of her work have provided some of the first visual records of our nonverbal medium. Most recently, she has carried her work to Israel and Japan and now looks forward with enthusiasm to discovering universal elements in dance therapy cross-culturally. Sharon's warmth, vitality, and dedication to the dance therapy field have made her one of the key figures in the development of the profession.