Creative Arts Therapy Careers: Succeeding as a Creative Professional

By: Bailey, Sally D.

Creative Arts Therapy Careers is a collection of essays and interviews by working drama, dance/movement, music, art, poetry, and expressive arts therapists that shows theatre, dance, music, and visual arts students exactly how to turn their training into a career in psychotherapy.

Most creative arts students never hear about this career path until they stumble onto it by accident. A young performer or painter looking for what comes next after their degree searches for "careers in theatre" or "art career ideas" and finds acting jobs, teaching jobs, gallery jobs, nothing about the therapists across the country using drama, dance, music, art, poetry, and creative writing to help people process trauma, manage mental illness, and build a life. Existing therapy and psychology career guides don't fill the gap either: at best they mention "art therapy" as a single narrow specialty, without showing how six distinct creative arts therapy fields actually differ, train, and pay, or how the credentialing path works, which varies by field and rarely means what people assume it means.

This book closes that gap directly. Thirty essays and interviews, organized across five career stages, Getting Started, Sticking It Out, Finding Success, Getting Ahead, and Starting Again, walk through what working creative arts therapists actually experienced: choosing the right graduate program, how registration and certification work across each of the six fields, what it's really like working with at-risk populations in medical, educational, correctional, and mental health settings, and how practitioners have built, and rebuilt, careers and businesses around this work.

This book is written for undergraduate and graduate students in theatre, dance, music, and the visual arts who are wondering what comes next; for instructors and advisors preparing arts students for the professional world; and for working artists considering a second career that puts their training to direct use helping others heal.

If you've ever wondered what you could actually do with a degree in the arts beyond performing or exhibiting, this book was written for you.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0367476533
• ISBN13: 9780367476533
• Release Date: September 2021
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 242 Pages
• Weight: 0.88 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 8.9"