The Performing Arts as a Useful Tool in Dispute Resolution Across Cultures

This one-hour presentation examines how the performing arts can serve as effective tools for peacebuilding, intercultural dialogue, and dispute resolution across diverse communities. Through examples drawn from theater, storytelling, music, dance, and performance traditions from around the world, the session will explore how artistic expression can foster empathy, deepen understanding, and create opportunities for reconciliation in contexts of conflict and cultural difference.

The session will combine a presentation on how the performing arts has been used in conflict resolution in different cultures and scenarios. Real-world examples from community mediation, peacebuilding initiatives, and intercultural dialogue programs will also be highlighted. The session is designed for peacebuilders, educators, artists, mediators, and community practitioners interested in innovative and culturally responsive approaches to conflict transformation. Rather than focusing on theory alone, the presentation will demonstrate practical ways performing arts methods can be integrated into peacebuilding and community engagement practices.

Participants will gain a broader understanding of how the performing arts can contribute to dispute resolution and peacebuilding efforts. They will leave with concrete examples, conceptual frameworks, and practical ideas for incorporating artistic and culturally grounded approaches into their own work in mediation, education, community engagement, and intercultural communication.

Robyn Weisman, Esq., L.L.M.

Ms. Weisman has run a practice in New York specializing in litigating personal injury and medical malpractice as well as directing a Divorce Mediation Center handling uncontested divorce cases. She has been an appointed mediator for Family Court, an appointed mediator for Supreme Court New York County, Queens County, Richmond and Kings County and a Master Arbitrator for the New York State Insurance Department through American Arbitration Association. As a FINRA arbitrator she arbitrates employment and securities cases.  She is also an appointed Special Master for New York State Appellate Division 2nd Department mediating appeals related to matrimonial disputes, personal injury and medical malpractice cases. She has also judged numerous competitions for law schools in trials, negotiations and  medical negligence.

In addition, she recently earned her LLM in Dispute Resolution and held lectures on cultural issues relating to mediation and arbitration, neuroscience in mediation, as well as how to break impasses in negotiations.  She has written papers on the importance of cultural fluency in family law cases, neuroscience and how it relates to mediation, how performing arts can be a useful tool in conflict resolution, online mediation in family court which includes a discussion on AI and ethics, a handbook for divorce mediators, as well as a design system for mediation in medical malpractice cases.