Cathy Busby has a broad, long-term interest in pain and, specifically, ways that emotional states are represented in popular culture. Her early training at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (BFA, 1984) laid the groundwork for her multi-disciplinary approach to this work. She presented Self-Help Library at the New Museum of Art, New York (1994) and Where Does It Hurt? at the Banff Centre for the Arts (1996). She was a contributor and co-editor of When Pain Strikes (University of Minnesota, 1999) an anthology including work by 28 artists, pain experts and people in pain. Her Ph.D. in Communication (Concordia University, 2000) included an examination of the production of self-help literature and an analysis of victim to survivor identity. In the process, she coined the term ‘autopathography’, to describe the telling of life stories in terms of suffering.