Professor Michelle LeBaron is a conflict transformation scholar/practitioner at UBC’s Allard School of Law whose work features creativity, culture and interdisciplinarity. She has made seminal contributions to many types of conflict engagement including intercultural, international, family, organizational and commercial. Michelle’s current work focuses on dialogic approaches to conflicts with religious and worldview dimensions. With professional dancers, visual artists and musicians, she applies expressive and creative arts in addressing intractable conflicts.

Michelle collaborates with scholars from South Africa and Ireland on issues of transitional justice, symbolic reparations and commemorations of collective traumas. Earlier, she worked as a family and commercial mediator, and she continues to offer training in these areas as well as acting as a facilitator for large-scale private/public collaborations.

Michelle was a fellow at the Trinity College Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute in Dublin, held a Wallenberg Fellowship at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies, South Africa and was a professor at the School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University in the USA. Her books include Changing Our Worlds: Art as Transformative Practice; The Choreography of Resolution: Conflict, Movement and Neuroscience; Conflict Across Cultures: A New Approach for a Changing World; Bridging Cultural Conflicts; and Bridging Troubled Waters.

Photo credit Charlie Naylor