Dr. Tomek Skiba is a person shaped by movement between countries, cultures, communities, and ways of understanding life.

Born in Poland, Tomek left the country as a young man and began building his adult life in the United States. Entering a new culture gave him space to develop, study, question, struggle, and discover different possibilities within himself. New York eventually gave him a sense of home, while experiences beyond it continued shaping the person he became.

Before entering clinical psychology, Tomek explored more expressive and creative dimensions of himself. These experiences allowed him to discover different ways of communicating, being seen, and connecting with others. They were not separate from the life that followed. They became part of the human experience he would later bring into psychology, education, art, and his understanding of how people reveal—or conceal—different parts of themselves.

Tomek was formed through encounters with people: those who trusted him with experiences they could not easily share, students who brought their own histories into the classroom, communities that allowed him to enter their worlds, and people whose lives challenged what he believed he already understood.

Clinical psychology became one of the principal ways he learned to meet the human story. His work has taken him through inpatient psychiatry, state-hospital treatment, crisis intervention, intensive outpatient care, psychological and vocational assessment, community mental health, and private practice. Within these settings, he encountered people living through trauma, displacement, mental illness, cultural conflict, relational pain, questions of identity, and the struggle to remain connected to themselves. These encounters taught him to look beyond a diagnosis or explanation and listen for the person whose life could never be fully represented by either.

For many years, Tomek also taught psychology at Miami Dade College, colleges in California, the City University of New York, and New York University. Teaching allowed knowledge to enter into conversation with lived experience. His students were not simply recipients of what he knew; their questions, differences, and stories also participated in his continuing education as a human being.

His life continued developing beyond clinics and classrooms. Through travel, humanitarian involvement, and sustained encounters with people and communities in Uganda, Colombia, Egypt, Palestine, Mexico, Morocco, and elsewhere, he experienced different cultural and spiritual languages for suffering, dignity, belonging, resilience, healing, and connection. He did not leave these places with a single explanation of humanity. He left with a deeper respect for how much of another person’s world can never be assumed from the outside.

Art emerged from this same life. Clinical work taught Tomek to listen for what lived beneath words; art offered him a way to approach what words and psychological language could not fully contain. His images became another form of human encounter—a space where something unseen within one person might be recognized by another.

Today, through Restore Self and projects such as X-Rays of Being, Tomek draws upon the full range of his human experience—immigration, creativity, clinical practice, education, travel, humanitarian engagement, relationships, struggle, and encounters with others—to communicate something about the value and complexity of being human. These are not separate identities or accomplishments assembled into one biography. They are different expressions of one developing life.

X-Rays of Being brings that life to Marrakech, but Tomek’s own story is not its final subject. It is an invitation for each person to look again: at what may be hidden beneath the identities placed upon us, at what remains unseen within another person, and at the humanity that no single story or explanation can fully contain.

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