Maryna Sliot: Music Therapy, Workshops, Lectures

Art Therapy Force actively collaborates with professionals in art therapy and related fields within the Arts and Health direction. One such specialist is Maryna Sliot.

Maryna (Masha) Sliot is a music therapist and psychologist, lecturer, and speaker at international conferences, participating in numerous charitable projects. She obtained her musical education at the Odesa National A.V. Nezhdanova Academy of Music and later trained as a practical psychologist at K.D. Ushynsky South Ukrainian National Pedagogical University and as a music therapist in a program by the Ukrainian Union of Psychotherapists and the Vienna Institute of Music Therapy. Marina is a member of the Orff Schulwerk Association of Ukraine and the Ukrainian Association of Music Therapists.

Maryna is a specialist at the NGO “Center for Psychological Assistance ‘Confidence’”, participating in projects supporting families with children with special educational needs (SEN), family-type homes (FTH), as well as foster parents, guardians, internally displaced persons (IDPs), specialists of Inclusive Resource Centers (IRCs), rehabilitation centers, and social services. Since 2023, Marina has been collaborating with Art Therapy Force as a psychologist and music therapist.

Kids Art Retreat Project and Family Art Retreat Project

The Kids Art Retreat Project is a series of art therapy camps for children from the most war-affected regions of Ukraine. During these projects, children engage in various creative activities aimed at rehabilitating and restoring their psycho-emotional state. The Family Art Retreat Project involved internally displaced children and their families in Lviv.

Since the October session of the Kids Art Retreat Project, Maryna Sliot has been working as a camp psychologist. She stays with the children during activities, monitors their psychological state, and intervenes when art therapy sessions evoke difficult memories and complex negative emotions, helping children return to their usual state.

Additionally, Maryna analyzes incoming questionnaires and surveys at the end of the children’s stay at the camp. She tracks dynamics, discusses recommendations with coordinators and mentors for each group of children and individually for each child. After the project concludes, we publish her analysis of the camp and the participants’ psycho-emotional state in the “Professional Materials” section.

Music Therapy for Children and Adults

Initiated by our project, Maryna Sliot conducts music therapy sessions with children and adults across Ukraine. These sessions aim to stabilize the emotional background, release, and process negative emotions. During the sessions, children play role-playing games where everyone can feel like a leader, express aggression and anger in a safe way, positively affecting their overall condition. The sessions allow for improvisation in a circle, fostering the joy of play, spontaneity, informal communication, and creative self-expression, ultimately improving mood and increasing energy for recovery.

Music therapy is a psychotherapeutic method based on various forms of interaction with music, particularly on the active musical engagement of the therapy participants.

“In music therapy, different forms of improvisation are used, for example, participants take part in a spontaneous orchestra — as musicians or conductors. We also write songs and musical compositions together. Music is an additional tool for non-verbal communication between participants. It unites people on an emotional level, enhances interaction and understanding in the group, synchronizes, and aligns people on a deep bodily level — when we can feel each other without words.

Music therapy sessions release creative potential: by improving contact with oneself and others, through creating song lyrics and melodies. Music created from the inner impulse ‘here and now’ allows one to shed heavy experiences associated with traumatic events, revitalizes a person, and enhances their emotional background. Creating unique musical material as a group of participants is not only an exciting creative process with lots of ideas but also a sense of unity that arises in shared rhythm, breathing, and singing. Even just being in such a collective circle has a healing effect,” shares Maryna Sliot.

Maryna conducts music therapy sessions at the Unbroken rehabilitation center and in the neurological and rehabilitation departments of St. Nicholas Hospital in Lviv, at the Rehabilitation Center for Children with Disabilities in Kropyvnytskyi, as well as at the MIRUM clinic in Kyiv. Besides patients in medical facilities, Maryna also holds sessions, including drum circles, for military personnel and their families.

Educational Activities

There is an urgent need today to popularize art therapy for the psycho-emotional recovery of Ukrainians and to increase the number of specialists in this field. Therefore, we actively initiate lectures and educational projects for students, psychologists, doctors, and artists.

Maryna Sliot regularly delivers lectures for psychologists working with children with SEN, as well as for psychologists in kindergartens and Inclusive Resource Centers (IRCs), doctors, and educators. These lectures aim to enhance the professional competence of specialists.

We invite you to watch Maryna’s lecture on “Data Collection and Evaluation of the Impact of Art Therapy Projects,” delivered as part of a joint series of educational webinars by Art Therapy Force and the NGO “Insha Osvita.”