drena@nycreativetherapists.com
A co-founder of New York Creative Arts Therapists, Drena is a graduate of the Masters program at Pratt Institute in Creative Arts Therapy and the MSW program at NYU Social Work. She is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at New York University in the Silver School of Social Work. Drena's approach combines art and talk therapy to reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression related to current life challenges, childhood abuse, emotional abuse, trauma, daily stress, ADHD, and burnout. She recognizes the power of the creative process combined with cognitive-behavioral interventions in moving clients of all ages from stuck places that keep them from enjoying life fully and reaching their full potential. With her additional training in ACT (Acceptance and Committment Therapy), PCIT (Parent-Child Interaction Therapy) a protocol designed to reduce oppositional behavior in children by improving the parent-child relationship, and PET (Prolonged Exposure Therapy) for trauma treatment, she has a generous toolbox of interventions at her disposal to help her clients. Drena has a particular interest in helping to ameliorate the effects our culture's unspoken messsage to perform optimally at all times— a formula for burnout and situational depression in working professionals, parents, and teens. She presents regularly on the problem of burnout and vicarious trauma in the helping professions and offers weekly art therapy support groups on these topics. She holds a BFA in Graphic Design from the University of Florida. Her personal art runs the gamut from other-worldly abstract paintings to realistic portraits and hundreds of 1-hour, one-off sketches of whatever is on her mind.
Read an interview with Drena on the NYU Art Therapy blog.