Catherine Rogers, MFA, MS is Associate Director and Lecturer in the Program in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University, New York (USA) and co-director, with Rita Charon, of Narrative Medicine International. A playwright, actor, and narrative medicine specialist, her work bridges performance, education, and health care, with particular emphasis on creative writing as a means of developing cognitive, linguistic, and clinical competence. At Columbia, she teaches in the MS in Narrative Medicine at the School of Professional Studies and holds annual faculty appointments with the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, where she leads the narrative medicine elective in playwriting, and with the Robert Wood Johnson SHPEP Program at Irving Medical Center. In addition, she teaches Foundations of Narrative Medicine: Creative Inquiry in Bioethics at the Center for Bioethics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York, and facilitates monthly narrative medicine seminars for clinicians at the Brookdale Department of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine and the Division of General Internal Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York. Past positions include Director of the Southeast Texas Arts Council, Program Officer at Texas Commission on the Arts, and Assistant Professor Humanities at NYU. Her national and international academic engagements include Fulbright Specialist residencies at Aristotle University Thessaloniki School of English (2013) and the Faculty of Medicine, Universiti Malaya (2024). She has presented invited lectures, workshops, and seminars at Georgetown University School of Medicine, the Arnold P. Gold Foundation, Pace University, Chestnut Hill College, York Hospital (PA), Salem Hospital (OR), Université Bordeaux Montaigne, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, among many others. Rogers’ scholarly and creative publications appear in TDR/The Drama Review, Voices Made Flesh (University of Wisconsin Press), Our Changing Journey . . . Reshaping Death (Prager), Gettysburg Review, and other academic and literary venues. A James A. Michener Fellow in playwriting, her plays have been produced at 29th Street Playwrights Collective (NYC and Athens), Cleveland Public Theatre, Dixon Place, Women's Project, HERE Arts Center, and many other professional theaters and academic venues. She is a member of SAG-AFTRA and the Dramatists Guild of America.

The Specialist residency at the University of Ioannina School of Medicine will be the first narrative medicine program in Greece initiated by a medical school, building on developments that began with the 2013 Specialist residency at the School of English, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. At Ioannina School of Medicine, the Specialist will teach a three-week course in the interdisciplinary practice of narrative medicine for a mixed cohort of arts, humanities, and medical students, facilitate a workshop for an interprofessional group of arts, humanities, and healthcare professionals, and deliver a public academic lecture, livestreamed globally, on the evolution of narrative medicine in the United States—from its inception at Columbia University in 2000 to its current worldwide presence.