The Imaginal Institute

 

 

Martha Velez, Ph.D.
Founding Fellow

Martha Velez, M.A., IMFT, Ph.D. has amassed forty years of experience as a performing artist. Her journey has taken her through the artist’s international pathway of multiculturalism and diversity. As an undergrad Speech/ Theater major at New York’s Long Island University, she recorded and toured with two internationally acclaimed albums as part of the folk group The Gaslight Singers.

Martha has eight successful and highly respected Sire/Warner Bros. recording albums to her credit. This singer/songwriter’s music, as solo artist, was recorded with international iconic players Eric Clapton, Christine McVie and  Bob Marley and the Wailers.

She performed several Broadway and Off Broadway roles including the lead in HAIR on Broadway, replacing, but veering from the fabulous career footsteps of Diane Keaton. She later went on to found the Rexford Repertory Theater in Beverly Hills, Ca. which resulted in her award winning playwriting debut Power of the Powerless. Velez wrote the songs for the play and directed the socially responsible theater piece that focused on the highly controversial illegal immigration issue. For this production she was the recipient of the Playwright and Acting Award from the Southern California Libraries of Social Studies and Research.

Martha went on to create and produce five seasons of the innovative bilingual Spanish/English television show, Generation Tu! , the first of its kind Latino magazine show. As the President of Cross Currents Productions, she went on to produce several theatrical properties including the docudrama Hemingway in Cuba filmed in Cuba. She created the Improvised Shakespeare Workshop for Teens as a tool to familiarize at-risk youth with the Bard. She is the founder and Artistic Director of BARC, Broadway Arts Repertory Company. BARC is a theater arts program, the prototype of which was developed at Performing Arts High School in Manhattan (FAME, the movie was based on this school) from which Velez graduated as a Drama major.

Velez holds a Masters in Clinical Psychology from Antioch University and is an intern  licensed iMFT psychotherapist pending full licensure. She holds a Masters Degree and Ph.D. in Cultural Mythology and Depth Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute. Her dissertation, Athena’s Armor/ Aphrodite’s Amor: Mythopoesis of the American Latina, Puerto Rican Women’s Identity Through the Lens of  Depth Psychology, Santeria and Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, examines the impact of Latino women on American culture.

Martha is New York City born. Her parents were from Puerto Rico and Spain which explains her second generation passion for unraveling the Latino experience and why she is so adept at the Castanets. At this point in her tangential life, she is imagining how all these life extensions came to be; how all this fits together in its most vivid imaginal context.