Naomi Feil

Naomi Feil, M.S., A.C.S.W., is the developer of Validation. She was born in Munich in 1932, and grew up in the Montefiore Home for the Aged in Cleveland Ohio, where her father was the administrator and her mother, the head of the Social Service Department. After graduating with a Masters degree in Social Work from Columbia University in New York, she began working with the elderly. Between 1963 and 1980 Mrs. Feil developed Validation as a response to her dissatisfaction with traditional methods of working with the severely disoriented old-old people who were her clients. In 1982 she published her first book, Validation: The Feil Method, which was revised in 1992. Her second book, The Validation Breakthrough, was published in 1993, and updated and revised in 2012. Feil and her husband have made many films and videos about aging and Validation. Feil is the Executive Director of the Validation Training Institute and a popular speaker in North America and Europe. Since 1989 she has toured Europe 3 times a year offering workshops in Validation to participants in Germany, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, France, Belgium, Italy, Great Britain, and Austria. Her books have been translated into French, Dutch, German, Italian, Finnish, Danish, Swedish, Spanish and Japanese.