Program Director, Forensic Traumatologist, Social Scientist
The Kolo:Women's Cross Cultural Collaboration
Olympia, Washington, United States
Dr. Danica Anderson earned her PhD in Clinical Psychology, with a concentration in Somatics, from the Chicago School of Professional Psychology in 2014, with a specialization in embodied memory, oral traditions, and transgenerational trauma. Her interdisciplinary work integrates trauma studies, social epigenetics, neurobiology, and cultural memory, with a strong emphasis on oral epistemologies and somatic knowledge transmission.
Dr. Anderson is the founder and Program Director of The Kolo Women’s Cross Cultural Collaboration, where she works with women and children—survivors of war, conflict, and war crimes—on trauma, embodiment, ritual, and memory. Her work spans over two decades and includes both academic and applied research roles, with fieldwork conducted in active and post-conflict zones across the Balkans, Sub-Saharan Africa, Afghanistan, India, Sri Lanka, Haiti, Jamaica, and refugee communities globally.
Her work centers on how cultural epigenetic memory practices and archetypal circular ritual forms provide neurobiological frameworks for survival, collective healing, and resistance in communities shaped by violence, displacement, and generational trauma.
Dr. Anderson’s recent publications include South Slavic Women and the Use of Oral Memory (2024), which examines oral memory and domestic rituals in preserving cultural identity amid war and systemic erasure, and Memory in Motion: Epigenetics, Ritual, and the Moving Archive, which advances a Kolo-informed trauma framework grounded in neurobiology, biopsychology present in cultural oral memory practices. She is also the author of numerous peer-reviewed articles on polyvagal theory, social epigenetics, perinatal-natal psychology (maternal fright), embodied trauma, and ritual healing practices.
Dr. Anderson continues to be an invited speaker at international conferences on trauma, performance, and conflict studies. Her ongoing work explores how embodied, circular, and oral traditions function as cultural technologies of memory and repair in war-affected communities, offering vital alternatives to dominant clinical trauma paradigms.
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Memory in Motion: Social Epigenetics Intergenerational Trauma
Monday, March 30, 2026
8:30 AM - 8:50 AM US Pacific Time