Celebrating the Life of Christine LaCerva (1950-2022)

The East Side Institute community is deeply saddened by the passing of our beloved colleague, faculty member and friend, Christine LaCerva on March 10, 2022. Christine was 71 and died of complications of Alzheimer’s Disease. Lovingly known as “The Community Therapist,” Christine was a creative powerhouse, challenging the strictures and inhumanity of diagnostic psychology and contributing mightily to a performatory psychology of becoming. With astonishing inventiveness and matter-of-factness, she directed her group-therapy patients (young and old) to create developmental “plays” across the many (clichéd, and sometimes harrowing) scenes of their lives. For more than three decades, working alongside social therapy founder Fred Newman, she pioneered a multi-family group approach to helping children and adolescents including those diagnosed along the Autism spectrum. Her groundbreaking therapeutic work with young people is chronicled in several collections, including “Social Therapy and Family Play” in Smagorinsky, P. (Ed.) Creativity and Community Among Autism Spectrum Youth (Palgrave, 2016); “Social Therapy with Special Needs Children and Their Families” in Lobman, C. & O’Neill, B. (Eds.) Play and Performance (University Press of America, 2011); and “The Community Therapist” blog.

Born December 5, 1950 in the Bronx, Christine and her three sisters were raised by their mother in a struggling Italian/German-American family in East New York, Brooklyn. She studied dance at SUNY Purchase and American Sign Language at Gallaudet University, embarking on a creative relationship with famed dancer and educator Jaques D’Amboise exploring  non-traditional ballet with deaf youth. Her work with deaf students was the subject of a New York Times feature article in 1979. She worked as a high school special education teacher and directed the East Side Institute’s Vygotskian school, the Barbara Taylor School for several years.  She completed a Masters degree in community psychology and special education at Teachers College, Columbia University.

Christine founded the Brooklyn Social Therapy Group in 1993 and led the Social Therapy Group clinical practices in Manhattan and Brooklyn until her retirement in 2016. In addition to her large group practice and her pioneering multi-family groups, she supervised nearly a dozen social therapists, led the East Side Institute’s training program, and hosted visitors, including scores of international students. She turned the Brooklyn Social Therapy Group into a unique and vibrant multi-racial community hub in the becoming-gentrified Fort Greene neighborhood. Christine led the way for staff and clientele alike to participate in making the Brooklyn Center into a home for performatory therapy and the creative arts. Among her innovations were avant-garde musical concerts, lectures, conversations and devised plays about the impact of gentrification in Fort Greene, booths at neighborhood street fairs, church and civic events, and bringing street surveys to diverse Brooklyn communities asking, “Does Our Community Need Therapy?” Our heartfelt condolences to her life partner Nancy Salsarulo, her sisters Carol Lessard Castillo and Debra Weinberg and the many other friends, clients and colleagues worldwide who count her as beloved.

Donations in Christine’s memory may be made to the East Side Institute.