The poetry workshop will be followed by an interactive session with Dr. Grieder between 2.00pm to 4.00pm

About Dr. Andrea Grieder

Dr. Andrea Grieder is a well known poet, anthropologist and feminist from Switzerland. She studied at the University of Zurich and then completed her Ph.D in Paris. She is the founder of Transpoesis, an international network of poets and lovers of poetry concerned with the use of poetry (and other arts) in social healing. Much of her work has been in Rwanda where she has worked with survivors of the genocide there utilizing poetry and performance.

She regularly organizes poetry workshops in Africa and Europe, and runs workshops around the theme of “Women’s Voices and Social Transformation”. In those workshops she explores the transformative power of women’s voices on an individual, communal and social level, and focuses in particular on artistic expressions of women in different cultures and societies as a way of dealing with experiences of violence, war or exclusion.  She draws on her deep experiences in Rwanda and elsewhere in Africa and Latin America (Columbia) of working to re-shape women’s place in society, and has worked with victims of sexual violence and with memory work through artistic expression. Her workshops are composed of both presentations and group work with a creative element, and she teaches through and about creativity, and draws also on her professional training as an anthropologist.

She is the author of a recent book about her work in Rwanda (in French, but approximately translated as “Hills of a Thousand Memories”).