Dr. Courtney Worley Carlisle is a bi-vocational artist, and board certified clinical psychologist from the rural southern United States. She combines her training in sleep and trauma psychology with mindfulness meditation as she explores different art mediums. Her mindfulness based art practice is a means to communicate with others as well as in increasing her own well-being. She uses art to process or intersecting identities as a woman in academic medicine and a child of the rural south. Courtney has been a painter for nearly 3 decades, but returned to the canvas with intention in 2019. Works in the early 2020s focused on a mindfulness based abstract approach using fluid mediums. They allowed her to explore themes that integrate her intersecting identities and roles.

She frequently uses travel experiences from extreme landscapes to inform the color and movement in her work. Travel helps her to disconnect from the pressure of multiple roles and reflect on her roots as a child of the rural south. Her color palette is influenced by the natural world, including colors that are unexpected in nature.

After the death of her father in 2022, she moved into fiber arts as a way to process the loss. She began exploring the crochet that her paternal grandmother made between pound cake and pea picking. She used her fathers old work shirts as raw material to teach herself to quilt to create unique memorial pieces for herself and her family.