I am a Licensed Professional Counselor Candidate (Colorado) with a passion for working with visual artists, writers, poets, musicians, filmmakers, dancers, choreographers, performing artists, designers, and artists engaged in emergent creative disciplines.  I am a visual artist and writer who believes that creative expression can be a way to engage the healing process and help us make meaning in this tumultuous world. I also believe in the power of experiencing diverse forms of art and culture, created by other artists, as a kind of medicine.  Both the creative process and the emotional healing process have the potential to foster empowerment, compassion, and transformation.

I received my MA in Mental Health Counseling from Northwestern University, my MFA in Visual Art from Rutgers University, and my BFA in Visual Studies from Iowa State University.  Before I became a counselor I spent fifteen years teaching studio art and cultural studies courses at colleges and universities across the United States. My counseling research and interests focus on artist identity, creative practice, and the unique well-being needs of artists.  In a broader sense, my interests related to being human and all that entails, include: finding purpose and making meaning; navigating sensitivities and neurodiversity, relationships and friendships; loss and grief; fertility and infertility; motherhood and parenthood; career and livelihood; and spirituality.  

In my practice working with counseling clients, I draw on psychodynamic, humanistic, and trauma-informed approaches to therapy, paired with creative and poetic strategies.  I am particularly fascinated by existential and feminist perspectives in therapy. Looking through a holistic lens—contexts, systems, identities—always informs the work, as well.  I am awed by the expansiveness of the human experience, including the traumas and the joys, and I celebrate the curiosity and strength that is an innate part of the therapeutic process with all my clients.  It is an honor and privilege to work in collaboration with those who are diving into the deep for both personal and collective healing.