Let’s Explore Your Inner World
WHO IS ISABELLE RIZO?
Isabelle Rizo is a Chicago-based Medical Art Psychotherapist at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital, where she works across acute care, the pediatric intensive care unit, neurology, and psychosomatic medicine with medically complex pediatric populations.
Her clinical framework — medical syncretism — integrates neuroscience, art psychotherapy, and ethnographic inquiry through the lens of Two-Eyed Seeing (Etuaptmumk), centering both biomedical and cultural knowledge systems as equally valid sources of clinical insight. She holds an MA in Counseling and Art Therapy from Adler University and a BA in Visual & Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Isabelle speaks and writes at the intersection of medicine, trauma-informed care, cultural ethnography, and medical humanities. She has presented at Self-Employment in the Arts Conference, the DNX Digital Nomad Conference in Berlin, Lectures on Tap, Show and Tell for Grown-Ups, Pagan Chicago, Le Laptop in Paris, The Visual & Critical Studies Symposium at the School of the Art Institute and more. Her artwork has been exhibited in Prague, Dubai, and Chicago.
Her Romanian and Transylvanian heritage, diasporic background, and grounding in Eastern European folklore and ritual inform a clinical sensibility and art practice that takes culture, symbol, and embodied knowledge seriously — not as a supplement to medicine, but as medicine itself.
MY TRAINING & EXPERIENCE
15+ years of community facilitation, consulting, and International Exhibiting
MA, Counseling & Art Therapy — Adler University
BA Visual & Critical Studies — School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Medical Art Psychotherapist, Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital
Member American Art Therapy Association
Speaker: Art Psychotherapy, Medical Syncretism, Romanian & Diaspora Experience
Contact
Whether you are interested in speaking, consulting, or research, please use the form below, and you will receive a prompt reply about moving forward together.