Hello, I'm Viv.

I'm a visual artist, musician, art therapist, and Montessori educator with over 20 years of experience working with children and adults. My approach to art therapy grows out of both my professional training and my own lived experience of using creativity to understand myself, work through emotional blocks, and find my way through difficult moments in life. For many years, I've kept my own personal art-making practice as a form of self-exploration and emotional expression. That experience taught me, firsthand, how powerful it can be to give shape, color, movement, and form to things that are hard to put into words. It's part of why I believe so deeply in art as a path toward greater self-awareness and emotional connection. My training includes a Master's degree in Art Therapy, studies in psychology, and years of exploring the work of Carl Jung, whose work centers on the collective unconscious and the symbolic language of the psyche. I'm especially drawn to how images and symbols emerge naturally through the creative process and reveal parts of our inner world we may not yet have language for. I don't see these images as things to be interpreted for someone. I see them as invitations, open doors into personal meaning, memory, emotion, and possibility. My job isn't to interpret your work for you. It's to help you read it, to sit alongside you as you notice what's there and arrive at your own insights. The meaning that matters most is the one you discover yourself. Alongside my private art therapy practice, I teach a 2nd-grade Montessori classroom and direct a Montessori teacher-training program. Being an educator, artist, therapist, and parent all at once has given me a layered, deeply human understanding of children and the many ways they communicate and experience the world. I've worked closely with children facing a wide range of emotional, social, and developmental challenges, and I've also served as a coach and mentor for children navigating their gender identity, working through self-esteem challenges related to dyslexia and learning differences, building confidence, developing emotional expression, and facing other personal struggles. Working with children has taught me to look past behavior and listen for what's underneath it. I try to see each child through a wider lens, not just what they're doing, but what they might be trying to say. Whether I'm working with a child or an adult, my goal is always to create a safe space where art can lead the way into the unconscious mind, and the process itself brings transformation from within.