Wellbeing Wednesdays: Art Therapy

Emily (she/her) is an arts educator, facilitator and administrator with over 15 years of experience witnessing the life changing power of the arts in communities and for individuals.  Throughout her career, she has focused on increasing access to the arts for those who have been historically denied, and for those whose access to creative expression holds urgent potential for themselves and society. 

Emily came to the field of art therapy as a converted skeptic after she could no longer deny what she saw in her professional work and is approaching her final semester for a master’s degree in Clinical Mental Health Counseling and Art Therapy at Wayne State University (2023, fingers crossed!).  Emily began her career as a middle school teacher teaching art, among other subjects, to students with emotional impairments, autism, and learning disabilities in New York City public schools. This was where she first saw the inextricable link between artistic creation and a human’s sense of self. For 9 years Emily managed creative arts programming for people with disabilities, mental health diagnoses, and other barriers to employment at Peckham, a vocational rehabilitation non-profit headquartered in Lansing.  Currently, Emily works at the University of Michigan’s Prison Creative Arts Project, where her efforts managing the Annual Exhibition of Artists in Michigan Prisons bring students and incarcerated artists together to share their common humanity through art.

Emily has a BFA in visual art and a BA in Psychology from the University of Michigan (2007), and an MSEd in Urban Education and Students with Disabilities from Mercy College in Bronx, NY (2009). She is a Michigan ACES Initiative trainer, trained in Therapeutic Crisis Intervention techniques, and has focused her graduate studies on the potential of art therapy to address nebulous yet universally human experiences like anger, bias, grief, identity and loneliness.