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.
Specialisations:
Working with the body and nervous system, as well as the miraculous mirrorball of the mind, to navigate challenges and support capacity for wellbeing
Affirming and exploring divergent experiences - self-insight and advocacy, making sense of clinical identifications (pre/post), ambiguity; therapy targeting other issues adapted for individual needs of ND folks
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)
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.
Enquiries: therapy@cardzerostudio.com.au
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