Arts Therapy

Niki provides creative arts therapy services to adults, young people and kids as part Rainbow Muse Collective. Card Zero Studio is home to her private practice, and she occasionally works through other service providers as well. She is professionally registered with allied health organisation ANZACATA.

Focus areas:

• Working with the body and nervous system, as well as the miraculous mirrorball of the mind, to navigate challenges and support capacity for wellbeing

• Exploring and understanding your individual way of experiencing the world - for example:

  • Supporting movement toward self-insight around how you may diverge from and/or align with other humans

  • Making sense of clinical identifications (pre/post) outside of the medical/diagnostic context

  • Collaborating on strategies to support functional development and assisting with advocacy

  • Holding ambiguity and dissonance

• Body awareness, movement and sensation alongside trauma, sensory/motor processing differences, pain and/or disability 

• Existential concerns/conflicts (e.g. reality, consciousness, meaning, death and dying, altered states)

• Outdoor sessions incorporating nature-supported methods

Cross-pollinating the roles of artist and therapist, I believe that art can take many forms beyond traditional categories and that any action can be creative. This includes actions we take to explore and navigate the landscapes of the self, relationships, and the world.

As a practicing artist, I have formed a strong personal relationship to dance, theatre, image making, writing and music. I see these media as opportunities to extend the range of human interactions to include factors such as physicality, imagination, contained risk, awe, irreverence, and not-knowing. I seek creative ways to welcome participants’ personal interests, skills and joys into the therapy space as resources.

Although I often work with visual art and craft materials, my arts therapy training is specialised in dance movement therapy. Within that lens, I have found my way to a relational neurobiological framework that highlights our bodied interactions with the world as key to making sense of ourselves.

As needed, I accompany people in exploring new ways of moving in the world, whether that be through dance-based methods (if that is their interest), physically active play, processes of making images or objects, or attending to micro movements such as breathing. Sitting down and having a chat is also movement, and can have the dynamics of a dance.

I believe passionately that it is everyone’s right to experience safety and agency in their body. In particular, I am interested in finding creative ways to support this where access to that experience has been systemically obstructed, by attending to cultural systems as well as the individual needs, knowledge and wishes of the people who navigate them.

Niki Schild AThR

BA Hons (Philosophy) - U.Syd
Master of Creative Arts Therapy (Dance Movement Therapy) - U.Melb

ANZACATA professional member: 67560514.

To make a referral or lodge your interest in working with Niki, please fill out this service request form. Please be aware that this does not guarantee service; you will receive a response as soon as a possible.

General enquiries: therapy@cardzerostudio.com.au

More info about how this works: FAQ