Healing Through Focused Activities

Creative therapies can help you in processing your misattributed parentage experience. Join art therapist Erin Partridge, Phd, ATR-BC as she centers us through a mindfulness/yoga activity followed by a fun art therapy project. Writer Dawn Davies will then lead us in a short fun writing exercise.

Erin is a board-certified, registered art therapist and Experiential Researcher-In-Residence at Elder Care Alliance. Erin received a BFA in 2006, studying fine art, psychology and women’s studies at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. She went on to obtain a MA in art therapy from New York University in 2008, and a PhD in art therapy from Notre Dame de Namur in 2016.

Erin’s teaching and lecturing experience includes teaching at NDNU in the art therapy department, guest lectures in art and counseling programs, mentoring undergraduate and graduate students, workshop facilitation at national and international conferences, and interviews with media about art therapy. Her clinical experience includes work in community, pediatric, forensic, and geriatric settings and she is published in the areas of art therapy, elder care, professional development and technology. Her research interests incorporate the lived experience and focus on participatory, ethnographic, and art-based approaches.

Erin’s first book Art Therapy with Older Adults: Connected and Empowered proposes a new framework for arts-based work with the aging population. Her second book, Getting On in the Creative Arts Therapies focuses on career trajectories in all the creative arts therapies disciplines. It includes practices designed to stimulate creative thinking about professional development. She has also authored several chapters and papers on art therapy with older adults, research methodologies, and social robots.

Dawn became a professional writer in 2003, mostly in online educational and web content, but also for a publishing company. Now she writes creatively, coaches other writers on how to improve their writing and meet or exceed their publishing goals, and very occasionally offers developmental manuscript editing. I love working with other writers.

She earned an MFA in Creative Writing at Florida International University. While there, she won the FIU Provost’s Award for Best Creative Project, the FIU Creative Writing Award in Nonfiction, the Kentucky Women Writers’ Betty Gabehart Prize for Creative Nonfiction, and the Arts & Letters Susan Atefat Prize in Creative Nonfiction. She was also the fiction editor of Gulf Stream Literary Magazine, and the graduate coordinator for the FIU Writers on the Bay Reading Series. Her memoir, Mothers of Sparta, published by Amy Einhorn at Flatiron Books, won both the Florida Book Award and the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award. She’s garnered fifty + publications in national literary journals, including McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Narrative, The Missouri Review, Ninth Letter, Fourth Genre, Arts & Letters, as well as other journals and anthologies. And, she’s the nonfiction editor for Jackleg Press.

She’s a Floridian; tall; and likes to ride her bicycle. And she can cook the best spicy cubed roasted sweet potatoes on the planet. Plus she loves working with other writers.