Expressive Arts Therapy > Faculty
Katriona Ilsedóttir Curry
Instructor
RCAT, RMFT, RCC, LMFT, RYTKatriona Ilsedóttir Curry (legal name: S. Katrina Curry) (she/they) is a creative-somatic psychotherapist, mentor, consultant, trainer, and facilitator, in the unceded Ancestral Territory of the Lək̓ʷəŋən speaking peoples – “in the place to smoke herring” – living among Oak and Camas, Cedar and Fern.
For the past 26 years, Katriona has specialized in gathering with folks to tend personal, collective, and ancestral trauma and co-kindle the beauty magic of living wisdom lineages. She roots her practice in improvisation, relational ecology, mysticism, and liberation praxis, carrying animism threaded through with feminist-Queer-antiracist-decolonizing streams of curiosity and encouragement.
Her professional work is informed by her personal, relational life. She is the descendant of Danish resistance fighters, the daughter of a feminist/PFLAG social justice activist mum, in a dance with a partner of 20 years, and is the mother of twins and a 2e autistic/gifted Lesbian daughter. As a neurodivergent, Queer, and unilaterally Deaf being, Katriona is interested in the arts of listening with curiosity to unfolding currents of embodied nuance.
As a vocalist, contemplative and ceremonial dancer, photographer, and painter, Katriona loves to be with/in the play of light, shadow, and wind among the trees and places where the land meets the edge of the waters. A life-long polymodal arts maker, she is graduate of the Vancouver Art Therapy Institute (1999-2001), melding Hakomi and Sensorimotor Psychotherapy with Visual Art Therapy, Dance Movement Therapy, Movement-Based Expressive Arts, theater and play, song and music.
Katriona has been teaching therapists for the past 24 years, at art therapy schools and expressive arts therapy programs – most recently with the Kutenai Art Therapy Institute. She is a faculty trainer with the Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute, teaching trauma therapy in Asia and North America – currently holding a Queer/Trans cohort of learners.
She is a Registered Canadian Art Therapist, Registered Couple and Family Therapist in Canada, a Registered Clinical Counselor in British Columbia, and a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in California. Katriona has recently been developing the Relational Ecology Collaboration School – a center for creative group facilitation training, and other programs at the confluence of creativity, ecology, mysticism, & collaborative alchemy for cultural shapeshifting.
A contemplative dance-movement teacher, she offers Body Songs: Soul Motion, in-person and online, and each summer she holds a Relational Ecology retreat at Stowel Lake Farm on Salt Spring Island – called Body as Earth Song: Vitality, Voice, and Vision. She’s delighted to be collaborating with this lovely group of humans who gather at the Expressive Arts Therapy Program based at the Vancouver Art Therapy Institute.