Patricia Heisser Metoyer Ph.D
National Executive Director

Dr. Patricia Heisser Metoyer, former Executive of the Screen Actors Guild, inaugural Commissioner of Arts and Culture for the City of Glendale, California and Consultant to the International House of Blues Foundation in Hollywood.

A graduate of the University of California, Irvine is trained as a psychologist - a specialist in child assessment, art therapy, learning theory and of changes in cognition and behavior as a consequence of diseases of the brain or mental dysfunction.

She completed an American Psychological Association Accredited Clinical Psychology Fellowship from UCLA - Neuropsychiatric Institute and worked as Senior Staff Psychologist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles for twelve years where she was responsible for psychodiagnostic assessment protocols for atypical children. She co-authored several studies on the portrayal of women, minorities and the disabled in television and film and has presented at major professional conferences on childhood learning disabilities and trauma.

Her dissertation was an application of Noam Chomsky's theory of language acquisition, entitled On the Acquisition of Specific Phonological Features in Inept Adolescent Readers.

She is also experienced in exploring applications of online environments in psychology and the education of professionals, students, and healthcare consumers. She has taught a number of online courses, provided and managed online content, reviewed websites for a number of business clients, and served as a discussion-forum host for several international professional groups.