Faculty Spotlight | Jennifer Schwartz

Jennifer Schwartz, B.Ed, DKATI, RCAT has worked as an art therapist for over 20 years in rural Child & Youth Mental Health. She lives in the mountains overlooking the Slocan Lake with her family, chickens and gardens. She specializes in complex trauma and is especially interested in understanding how both art therapy and the therapist’s imagination can help contain and transform persecutory anxieties.

Interview

What excites you right now in your teaching role? 

I am excited about expanding the benefits of psychoanalytic thinking and mentalization based treatment into the field of art therapy in mental health treatment. I am intrigued by primitive processes and non-mentalizing modes and how art therapy can give form and meaning to evacuated affects.

I enjoy practicing art psychotherapy because it is dynamic and responsive. The anxieties, fears, frustrations, patterns, and metaphors that emerge in session are addressed in the moment. This ensures that goals are client directed and that clients are met where they are at.

I feel that the sensory, relational, and culturally respectful aspects of art therapy are desperately needed in the digital, isolating and highly cognitive society we live in.

What is your personal pedagogy? 

My personal pedagogy is similar to my clinical approach in that I offer ideas for consideration and personal engagement. The seminar format combines instructional information, art-based experientials and inspired dialogue and discussion. I believe that this approach engages the imagination, the felt senses, and supports the accommodation of new knowledge.

Why did you choose to teach at KATI? 

I enjoy teaching at KATI because it offers a personalized approach to students that draws on their strengths and helps them develop and grow according to the art therapy approach that best suits their beliefs.

Art therapy skills can be applied in so many different areas of healing and growth. It is inspiring and exciting to watch this new generation of therapists work creatively and progressively and find new ways to reach people in need.

It is exceptionally rewarding to teach and supervise passionate and intelligent students alongside accomplished faculty at the Kutenai Art Therapy Institute.