REBECCA PLUMMER ROHLOFF, PhD
Dr. Rebecca Plummer Rohloff is a former tenured professor of arts education and an award winning visual artist. She serves as a certified contemplative/somatic therapist and has consulted on Mental Health and Wellness for Maya Health Alliance where she facilitated workplace practices in holistic healthcare and mindfulness training. She has integrated 25 years of arts-based research and teaching into holistic and transformative journeys that engage attuned attention, sensory inquiry, and risk taking — regenerative life principles that are mirrored in her personal practice and coaching in Somatic Therapy, Qoya Inspired Movement, visual arts and yoga classes. She is co-founder of the Antigua,Guatemalan branch of Threshold Choir, offering bed-side sings to those in life transition. She enjoys a good challenge and the strength training of mind and body.
Rebecca was born in Vincennes, Indiana and graduated from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale in fine arts and teacher education. Raised in a Methodist family and naturally artistic, she was deeply influenced by social service and the sacred arts of church choir, liturgical theater & dance. Rebecca trained in campus ministry while an art student in college and working as a resident assistant to international students, which eventually led to teaching abroad in Japan after graduation. She returned to the midwest and became a high school visual arts teacher utilizing the art room as a lab for empowering at-risk youth with vision and agency. Her Master’s degree at the University of Illinois focused on critical youth identity and the psychological impacts that media and visual culture have upon youth consumption. While pursuing her PhD at the U of I she served as a teaching assistant at Japan House, learning the art of Tea Ceremony among other Zen arts and aesthetics. In 2008 she completed her doctorate in Arts Education that explored inquiry tools for psyche and wholeness utilizing a phenomenological lens to encounter the experiential “lifeworld” of herself and another visual artist. In her thesis, Life Excavations: An Emancipatory Model of Self-inquiry, she utilized painting, visual journaling, dialogue and co-inquiry to unpack and metabolize the felt-sense layers of lived experience. This embodied reflection informed by zen meditation, yoga philosophy and later psychobiology and neuroscience, uncovered the dynamic mindbody feedback loop of transformative awareness in creative consciousness, somatic memory, and a non-dual Ground of Being, or flow state.
That research set the foundation for work in chronic stress reduction, trauma-informed coaching and impactful collective change influenced by a multifaceted lens of world arts and wisdom traditions such as Zen & Tibetan Buddhism, Perennial Philosophy and Transpersonal Psychology, Systems Theory and Theory U.
Rebecca’s visual art is both life excavation and meditation. The eclectic style of her visual expression runs the spectrum between the trained eye of a realistic illustrator, a whimsical surrealist, and a devotional visionary. Skilled across a variety of media, she has completed many exhibitions, commissions, community murals and projects including three illustrated book projects. She is also evolving in her process, some of which includes visual journaling & mind mapping, painted mandalas, mixed-media acrylic collages, machine stitched fiber mosaics, and polymer jewelry & wearable art, and en plein air watercolor. Her Wind Dancer mandalas, Rogue weavings, polymer clay jewelry, and 12x18” watercolors prints and gift cards of Antigua, Guatemala have been popular in art festivals and local markets. Thematic bodies of work include Flow Like Water (2024) Barefoot Wanderings Sabbatical Show (2017), The Spiraling Journey, Troubling Mythic Visual Culture, the Global Community, and Negotiating Guatemala.
When teaching, she enjoys holding aesthetically rich, safe spaces for expression that invites students to see, sense, and respond from the heart using multi-disciplinary tools such as movement, symbolism, poetry and song.
Rebecca is an avid pickleball player and finds joy in weightraining, meditation, gardening and cooking. She is presently authoring a book, Project Imaginarium: Towards Wholeness through Life Excavations.
Her partner, Dr. Peter Rohloff, is a Harvard Global Health fellow and core founder of Wuqu' Kawoq: Maya Health Alliance, a non-governmental organization in the Guatemala Highlands of Tecpan that supports healthcare in Maya Languages. They live in Antigua, Guatemala with their three furbabies. Please contact her at rprart@gmail.com
Social Media: Instagram: Becca’s Imaginarium
Selected Certifications
Contemplative Studies Program, The Gradual Path 2021-2022
Qoya Dance Inspired Movement 2020
Mind Body Therapy @ Embodied Philosophy.com 2019-2020
Kripalu 500 hr. Professional Yoga Teacher Training/ 2013 200 hr YYT 2013-2018
School of Transformational Life Coaching 2018
Usui Tradition in Reiki Level 1 & Master, 2018
Arts in Medicine, Shands Hospital 2008
Selected Facilitated Workshops
Un Taller de Mindfulness: Integrando Atención Plena en la vida cotidiana, 2024
Where is your Refuge?: A Meditative Collage Workshop, 2024
Align and Blossom:Imagineering Your Emergence with Embodied Mindmapping, 2019
Tuning Your Creative Compass for 2018: Setting New Life Intentions with Mapping, 2019
Radiance Sutras: A Valentine's Lovesong Poetry Reading, 2018
Creative Mindmapping As Meditative Journaling
Polymer Play: Creating Intricate Cane Design for Jewelry Making
Awards
2016 Marblehead Arts Fest, Don Howard Award of Excellence in Mixed Media
2013 Higher Education Art Educator of the Year, MAEA Massachusetts Art Ed Association
Articles
Negotiating Guatemala: Life With the Kaqchikel Maya. In Sextant, The Journal of Salem State University, Vol. XIX, No. 1, Spring 2011, pp. 21-31.
Solidarity, Global Scholarship, and the Ethics of Encounter: A Case Study From Guatemala. In E. Delacruz & M. Parsons (2009). Art Education and G.l.o.b.a.l.i.z.a.t.i.o.n. National Art Education Association.
Creative Interventions: Arts-based Living Pedagogy. In McCarthy, C. (Ed.). (2007). Globalizing cultural studies: Interventions in theory,methods and policy. New York: Peter Lang.
Beyond the Circus: Grounding A Visual Culture Pedagogy, in Duncum, P. (2006). Classroom practices in visual culture. Reston,VA: NAEA.