Video Portrait, Family History & Guided Autobiography Producer since 2001 - Present

• Made video portraits for individuals & their families

• Assisted elderly individuals to reminisce, write, document and share their life & family history in different media to be compiled into DVDs & websites: written narratives, memoirs, drawing & art making, photo-collages, scrap books, audio/video interviews, family photos and vintage home movies.

• Launched a Life History Class Website for a Jewish Community Organization on Fairfax Avenue in Los Angeles.

• Directed and edited a personal documentary about a Holocaust survivor: Fuehrerin, ich folge Dir nicht! (Ms-Leader, I follow you not!)

Licensed Psychotherapist Private Practice, MFC # 46883, San Fernando Valley, Burbank Present

CLINICAL EDUCATION

California Graduate Institute, Los Angeles
Master of Arts in Marital and Family Therapy, 2004

The Psychoanalytic Center of Los Angeles 
Intensive Course in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, 2005-06

Los Angeles Institute and Society for Psychoanalytic Studies 
Certificate in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, 2002

University of California, Los Angeles, Extension
Guided Autobiography - Telling your Life Story, 2001
Technique of Life Review & Reminiscence Therapy for the Elderly
James Birren, Ph.D. UCLA Center of Aging

ACADEMIC EDUCATION

Doctor of Philosophy in Film and Television Studies, 2001

Dissertation title: "The Shadow of the Object: Mourning and Melancholia in Autobiographical Film and Video about the Holocaust."

My dissertation is a psychoanalytic study of narrative figurations of bereavement in which textual traces of intense yearnings for a vanished people, their world and traditions bear testimony to the immense losses the Holocaust has inflicted on victims, their children and generations to come.

My dissertation about the autobiographical audio-visual representation of the Holocaust has been motivated by my ongoing desire to come to terms with my cultural background. As a postwar German citizen having grown up with the burden of a collective guilt inherited from the Nazi crimes, I have been preoccupied with questions as to how ordinary citizens willingly collaborated with Hitler's totalitarian regime.

Indeed watching these cinematic testimonies filled me with empathy for the victims and their children and a wish to help them - and by extension others - to work through devastating traumatic memories.  Moreover my deep friendship with Fred Klein, a Holocaust survivor motivated me to become a psychotherapist.