Beverley Costa

Dr Beverley Costa grew up in East London in a family with three languages and two religions and cultural practices. After training as a counsellor, psychotherapist and group psychodramatist, she set up Mothertongue, a multi-ethnic counselling service, to meet a gap she observed in services for multilingual clients. In 2009 she created a pool of mental health interpreters within Mothertongue and in 2010 established the national Bilingual Therapist and Mental Health Interpreter Forum. Beverley founded The Pasalo Project in 2017 (www.pasaloproject.org) to disseminate learning from Mothertongue. She is a Senior Practitioner Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London, and has published a number of papers and chapters on therapy across languages. With Professor Jean Marc Dewaele, she won the 2013 BACP Equality and Diversity Research Award. Beverley has delivered training and supervision to statutory and voluntary sector health and social care organisations for the past two decades and has produced two anthologies of interpreters’ stories and a play about a couple in a cross-language relationship, for the Soho Theatre, London. She co-founded the performance group of interpreters, Around the Well, in 2018.