This roundtable explores how memory, neuroscience, and storytelling intersect, highlighting memory as a dynamic process that shapes identity, healing, and self-understanding. It examines how art and science together can help us reinterpret and reshape our personal narratives.
An Afternoon of Art, Neuroscience & Storytelling
Join us for the New York premiere of the newly expanded 2025 edition of See Memory—the Bronze Telly Award–winning, hand-painted short documentary that premiered on PBS this spring.
Created by filmmaker and visual artist Viviane Silvera, See Memory brings the invisible workings of memory, trauma, and healing to life through over 40,000 individually painted frames. Blending breakthrough neuroscience with personal storytelling, the film is both a visceral art experience and a reflection on how we shape—and reshape—our past.
Following the screening, a multidisciplinary panel will explore how memory is more than just recall—it’s a powerful, living process of identity, imagination, and repair.
This immersive afternoon invites you to reflect on how our memories don’t define us—they evolve with us. And through art and insight, we can begin to rewrite our most powerful inner narratives.
Schedule:
- 2:00 pm - Movie (in person only)
- 2:30 pm - Discussion (in person & livestream)
All Helix Center events are free and open to the public, including this one!
Roundtables are streamed live our website and the recording remains available after the event events.
This is a past event that happened on October 4th, 2025 at 2:00PM.
Participants
Psychotherapist
Cheryl Dolinger Brown, LCSW, has been a psychotherapist for nearly fifty years, specializing in trauma therapy and couples work. She trained as a psychoanalyst, a trauma therapist certified in Somatic Experiencing and the Tapping Method, and couples therapist certified in Imago Relationship Therapy, PACT and the Doherty Approach. She treats those with acute- single incident...
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Professor, Neuroscience & Psychiatry, Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai
Dr. Daniela Schiller is a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry, the Nash Family Department of Neuroscience, and the Friedman Brain Institute, at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Her research is focused on how the brain represents and modifies emotional memories. Schiller got her PhD in Tel Aviv University and then continued...
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Artist & filmmaker
View Papers / Presentations »
Viviane Silvera is a Telly Award–winning filmmaker and visual artist whose work bridges neuroscience, psychology, and fine art to explore how memory shapes—and reshapes—our sense of self. Her acclaimed film See Memory—crafted from over 30,000 hand-painted frames—translates scientific insight into poetic visual storytelling, illustrating how trauma fragments memory and how healing becomes possible through presence, imagination, and narrative....
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Co-Director, Division of Narrative Medicine, Columbia University Irving Medical Center
Sr. Lecturer, Department of English & Comparative Literature, Columbia University
Professor Maura Spiegel is Co-Director of the Division of Narrative Medicine at Columbia University Irving Medical Center and Senior Lecturer in the Department of English & Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She teaches fiction and film courses often centering on topics of family, memory, place, and affect. She was the co-editor-in-chief of the journal Literature...
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Associate Professor, English, Film and Media, at Yale University
R. John Williams, PhD, is Professor of English, and Film and Media Studies at Yale University. He is the author of The Buddha in the Machine: Art, Technology, and the Meeting of East and West, and has published as well on a number of topics including religion, futurology, systems theory, psychoanalysis, and film and television. His...
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I would like to register for two tickets, please.
No registration is necessary. Event is free and open to the public. Seating is first come, first served.