Joanne Ramseyer

Joanne is a board-certified, registered art therapy with over three decades of experience practicing art therapy in a variety of community-based settings in the Chicago area. She was previously the Director of Art Therapy Services at a large mental health center where she created art therapy services for children, adolescents and adults with serious psychiatric and trauma histories living in Uptown and other marginalized Chicago neighborhoods. Joanne also directed a private practice community art studio offering creative arts classes for all ages, and workshops for the C.G. Jung Center in Evanston. During recent years she has co-facilitated monthly expressive arts groups for Veterans and their family members at the Evanston Veterans Center and led weekly creative process groups for older adults at The Mather Residence in Evanston.  

Joanne is currently working as an art therapist and art therapy clinical supervisor at a therapeutic school where she developed a comprehensive art therapy program serving adolescents with internalizing disorders, including a large number of transgendered youth. She has taught art therapy previously at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Mount Mary University and Northwestern University.  

Joanne has always emphasized a studio-based approach to art therapy that focuses on identifying and working with the transformative metaphors of the creative process and symbolic imagery. She combines this with a trauma-informed, relational-cultural and anti-oppressive framework using art to support resilience, healing and social action. Her art practice focuses on mixed-media narrative paintings, altered books and other three-dimensional art pieces incorporating text and nature-based or found-object materials. She is also interested in art making as a spiritual process.