Participant Biographies and Project Descriptions

Joel Harris
Joel Harris has an impressive and varied background as a professional visual artist with credits that include television, artwork for NASA astronaut training, magazines, greeting cards, medical illustrating and arts based curriculum for San Diego Schools.  He graduated from the University of Illinois with a Bachelor of Fine Arts and studied medical illustration and photography.  In October of 2006, realizing the important need for services for brain injured soldiers returning from Iraq Joel, acting as a volunteer, developed a therapeutic visual arts program for these veterans. 

With the help of the Foundation, Joel will expand his “Arts for Healing” volunteer work with service people and others who have experienced brain or spinal chord injury and are in need of rehabilitation.  Joel tailors his therapeutic art program to address each person’s particular disability.  As the hospital staff work towards physical and mental improvement with each patient, they attribute part of the successful healing process to Joel’s use of art and his ability to connect with others.  Hospital personnel are very thankful for his creative energy and ideas.  Joel states, “My work is to guide them in honing their drawing skills as they further develop their motor skill abilities.  The small successes they experience in each art-making session have a direct positive effect on their psychological attitude toward the future.”  Joel will work in the brain injury and rehabilitation units at the Veteran’s Administration Hospital and Scripps Hospital in Encinitas, which is a premier facility in Southern California for the treatment of brain injuries, and houses a large program devoted to returning injured veterans.