Bio
Marie A. Garlock, PhD, is the director of It Is In You projects and is based in Durham, NC. Marie (she/they) leads creative communication, collaborative research, and health and community-building initiatives that span the U.S. South and Global South. It Is In You partners are clinicians, artists, scientists, educators, policymakers, faith and advocacy leaders across diverse communities, institutions, and coalitions—people and organizations drawn together by the power of stories to promote health justice.
It is In You projects are sponsored by 501c3 Heartspace Spiritual Resources to receive grants and donations.
Marie Garlock dedicates her speech inside the NC state capitol rotunda to her mom, Barbara Marie Bosma Garlock, who passed away from cancer after losing her health care coverage. - Josh Rushing, Al Jazeera America "The Coverage Gap"
Background: For more than 2 decades, It is In You's Marie Garlock has been creating performances based on collaborative, community-embedded research.
Marie works with learners and luminaries of all demographics to facilitate workshops, organize festivals, and offer tailored programs in creative communication and health equity, in residencies and commissions across the U.S. and internationally.
Healthcare Bio for Introductions
Arts Leadership Bio for Introductions
Artist-Scholar Bio - Dept of Communication, UNC-CH
Patient Advocacy Profile - National Center for Health Research
Advocacy - Breast Cancer Action Community Leader
IHC - Interdisciplinary Health Communication Certification, UNC-CH
Guiding Values - It Is In You Programming
Overview: Based in lifelong enjoyment of the performing arts—storytelling and poetry, dance/movement, and devised theater/performance installation—Marie incorporates embodied learning principles into their teaching, facilitating, and mobilization of institutional/grassroots research and education initiatives. Dr. Garlock’s methods include Image/Form theater for conflict transformation, InterPlay for group discernment/connection, and Popular Education for systems-level thinking.
As an oral historian and story circle host, she has partnered with communities of patients, caregivers and clinicians facing advanced cancers, people dealing with burn injury traumas, youth displaced by drug trafficking, families displaced by multinational mining, women and LGBTQ adults leaving abusive relationships, people advocating for better policy for coal ash clean up / environmental racism, and for healthcare responsive to HIV/AIDS, mental health justice, and more. In these programs—including with people who may arrive stressed, nervous, uncertain, or overwhelmed—Dr. Garlock enjoys collaborating with participants to find expression, inner agency, and resources to shore themselves up in community.
More About It Is In You
Participants' experiences: In performances, workshops, residencies, and research presentations, participants in It is In You projects build skills and knowledge to engage tough problems their communities face, from a mix of intimately grounded and systems-level perspectives.
Values: It is In You presentations, performances, workshops, and trainings are enlivened by principles rooted in creative inquiry, outside-the-box collaboration, and the freshness brought by guided interactivity and structured opportunities for discernment, expression, witness, and dialogue. Health communication, cultural difference, and performance theory come alive through principled application, and open the door to new ways of doing, being, and knowing.
Practices: It is In You public events, residencies, and learning environments uniquely engage story-based, movement-based, sound/breath, and visual arts methods--understanding performance forms as a technique for communication that more viably promotes health and equity. In each program, participants envision constructive, community-specific openings and solutions, which involve diverse community stakeholders in experiences oriented equally toward process and product.
Purpose: It is In You projects and events invite us to re-imagine and re-inhabit our bodies, relationships, and interactions with institutions, social realities, and cultural expectations, in order to effectively move individual and collective pursuits forward toward health justice, social justice, and transformation of violent and inequitable conditions.