Riitta Parvia, SRDMP, ADMP U.K., ADTA, and ADTA International Dance Movement Therapy Committee. A native of Finland I have worked in Finland and in Norway to widen and deepen the understanding of dance as a discipline in education, and based on this understanding to develop dance therapy since the beginning of the 1970s. I was a founding member and the first chair of the Finnish Dance Therapy Association founded in 1994 at Jyväskylä University.

My degrees are in arts and crafts, music, milieu therapy, dance and psychomotor therapy, medicine, philosophy, visual anthropology and social anthropology.

My competence is in the arts, education, therapy, supervision, and lecturing. To mark a clear separation between dance education and dance therapy I proposed the concept of “therapeutic dance education” for therapeutic dance, and defined dance therapy as a form of clinical discipline.

Based on the belief that the human being is a whole, and that this whole is united with nature, dance therapy in my work is defined:

“Dance therapy is a holistic, interactive psychotherapy form based on therapeutic attitude. The dance therapist uses herself as a tool in therapy. The method employed in the therapy process is communication through movement. The aim of the therapy is to improve communication”. (Parvia 1991).