Misa Tsuruta, MA, PhD, was born and raised up in Japan. During her mid-20s she has a chance to move to the US, and graduated from New York University (MA in Genera/Educational Psychology, 2000) and from the New School for Social Research (Cognitive, Social and Developmental Psychology, PhD, 2016). Her doctoral dissertation was titled
Cultural Differences and Similarities in Dreams and Personal Narratives: A Comparison Between American and Japanese Undergraduate and Graduate Students. Since she was initially trained as a clinician, after she returned to Japan in 2009, she mostly worked in the clinical field. In 2015, she started her own practice,
Openmind Psychology, in Tokyo. She has also worked for EAP companies and an international school in her career in Japan.
She attended her first IASD conference in Copenhagen during the "chasm" between her master's and doctoral study, in 2004. Since then, she attended numerous IASD international and regional conferences. She has presented at most conferences she attended, and her topic areas include Japanese culture/history and dreams, art/creativity and dreams, among others. She is also active in creative/artistic activities such as dancing, paiting and writing. In 2020, she published her first book, The Multicultural Mind in Japanese.
Currently (2021), at IASD, she serves as a member of Diversity Task Force Advisory Committee (DAC) and shares responsibilities of co-chairs of Membership Committee with Dolores Nurss. She is also Regional Representative "At Large" in charge of SE Asia. (Please note that the Regional Rep for Japan is not her but Shuhei Enomoto.)
She is also a member of APA and Japanese Society of Transcultural Psychiatry.