Sharon Strouse

Sharon Strouse is a board-certified and licensed clinical professional art therapist and Associate Director for the Portland Institute for Loss and Transition. She is a workshop presenter for the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors 2008 to 2020. Her art therapy private practice, national presentations, trainings and practitioner supervision/ mentoring focus on traumatic loss, specifically with parents who have lost a child, suicide bereavement, and military family loss. The theoretical foundations of her group and individual art therapy work are grounded in meaning reconstruction, attachment informed grief therapy, continuing bonds with the deceased and restorative retelling. She is author of Artful Grief: A Diary of Healing, written twelve years after the suicide of her seventeen-year-old daughter, Kristin. Additional published works can be found in Neimeyer’s Techniques of Grief Therapy: Creative Practices for Counseling the Bereaved, Thompson and Neimeyer’s Grief and the Expressive Arts: Practices for Creating Meaning as well as, Di Maria’s, Exploring Ethical Issues in Art Therapy and Gershman and Thompson’s, Prescriptive Memory in Grief and Loss: The Art of Dreamscaping. She is co-founder of The Kristin Rita Strouse Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to supporting programs that increase awareness of mental health through education and the arts.