David A. Sasso, MD, MPH
Committee Chair
Dr. Sasso is a psychiatrist and musician who has published and presented nationally on topics at the intersection of mental health, music, and the arts. He is a Senior Fellow of the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry (GAP) and the founding chair of the GAP Committee on the Arts and Humanities. He has served on the GAP Board of Directors and currently serves on the GAP Fellowship Committee.
Dr. Sasso received his MD and MPH from the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University in Chicago, IL. He trained in Adult, Child, and Adolescent Psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine. He serves as Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and in the Child Study Center at Yale University School of Medicine and served for 9 years as Medical Director of the Child Guidance Center of Mid-Fairfield County, where he treated the Spanish-speaking population in Norwalk, CT. He maintains a private practice in psychiatry and psychotherapy in Connecticut.
Prior to medical school, David studied at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, where he received a Bachelor of Music in Music Composition alongside a B.S. in Biochemistry. His full length opera featuring children as the main characters and performers, The Trio of Minuet, was premiered in 2003. His published children's choir works are performed around the country.
Dr. Sasso, along with composer Deborah Fischer Teason, has worked with patients at Connecticut's state psychiatric hospital for youth to create a series of original opera scenes with the plot and music generated by the hospitalized teens themselves. These "Riverview Operas" were performed privately at the hospital and subsequently produced and presented publicly by the Hillhouse Opera Company in New Haven. In recent years, David has focused on American and world traditional folk genres on mandolin-family instruments. He plays with Connecticut bluegrass band Five 'n Change, and his duo project, Kat Wallace and David Sasso, has released two albums to local, national, and international critical acclaim. He recently appeared as a guest on Times Will Tell, a podcast of The Times of Israel, discussing his music and the many intersections between psychiatry and the arts.
Donald Carl Fidler, MD, FRCP-I
A native of the North Carolina Appalachian Mountains, Donald Fidler has combined a career in academic psychiatry and cultural psychiatry with a lifetime of playwriting, acting, directing, composing music, and teaching creative writing and the dramatic arts.
He studied theatre, writing, medicine, and psychiatry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he served on the faculty. He later served on the faculty at West Virginia University and also practiced psychiatry in Australia and New Zealand.
He began his acting career in outdoor dramas, summer stock theatre, and local films and television at age ten. He has written scripts and composed music for over fifty medical educational videos and his plays have been produced in community theatres, at universities, and in professional theatres in North Carolina, Virginia, Ohio, West Virginia, Alaska, St. Louis, Sacramento, San Diego, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, and New York City.
He consulted and appeared in educational productions for HBO, ABC, and PBS and performed in stage plays including: Hope is the Thing with Feathers, Night of January 16th, Thieves’ Carnival, Blood Wedding, Our Town, A Life in the Theatre, and Fool for Love. DC Fidler is an active member of the Dramatists Guild of America and the Charlotte Writers’ Club.
Fidler previously chaired the Video Committee for the American Psychiatric Association and served as President of the Association for Academic Psychiatry, promoting the use of arts in psychiatry. He was inducted as a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland and serves on the Arts and Humanities Committee for the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry, co-producing a video series on the History of Psychiatry.
Dr. Fidler lived and worked with the Alutiiq tribe in Akhiok, Alaska, the Al Moqbali Bedouin tribe near Sohar, Oman, the Kalkadoon Tribe in the outback of Queensland, Australia, and the Te Tau Ihu Maori Tribes on the South Island of New Zealand.
He is author of the textbook, Psychiatry for Actors: Building a Character Using Psychiatric Principles, and author of the novels, Boogieban and Wood Whisperers.