About Jen Johnson:

Jen has her MA in Drama Therapy from NYU and is a Registered Drama Therapist and board certified trainer.  She is a mother, school counselor in training, artist, poet, performer, director, singer, community collaborator, social justice activist, Yoga Calm facilitator, postpartum care support, wildcrafter, and Trauma Informed Care liaison.

She has 20 years of extensive experience working in clinical mental health, arts, education and non-profit arenas including hospital settings, partial hospitalization and day treatment with children, adolescents and their families, non-profits, including a domestic violence and sexual assault crisis center and hotline. She has worked with families who have experienced complex trauma and grief, domestic violence and sexual assault and helped create individual and group programs for children who survived incest and their caregivers. She attends to connecting and re-imagining with professionals and members of communities to create more collaboration in care.

Jen co-founded Arts in Action, a non-profit focused on collaborating with other Creative Arts Therapists and Community Artists to support communities by cooperatively creating trauma informed creative workshops, groups, classes and community arts events.  Jen also collaborated on Creative Connections, offering groups for new mothers and caregivers of infants in Polk County, WI that built awareness and responsiveness for perinatal and infant mental health in our community.

Jen has a deep commitment to creating original performances with youth as well as collaboratively creating improvisation based performance with adults in the roles of playwright, director and actor. The importance of addressing social, racial, gender, economic, and environmental justice is critical to her life and work.

Jen traveled to South Africa on a grant from the Foundation for Arts and Trauma to learn from Drama Therapists working with communities who have experienced oppression, racism and systemic, community, and interpersonal trauma and to offer workshops for Drama Therapists and Caregivers experiencing traumatic grief and secondary trauma.

Jen was a trainer and facilitator for Strengthening Families and Systems Trauma Informed Parenting workshops and THINK Trauma workshops for the state of Wisconsin.  She was also was an ACE Interface Trainer, through St. A’s of Milwaukee, raising awareness related to Adverse Childhood Events and their impact on public health. Jen is a Training Director for the Polaris Institute for Developmental Transformations (DvT) in the Midwest out of Chicago in the USA and supervises students internationally in Drama Therapy and DvT.  Jen is trained in and has supervised staff in Trauma Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and was the Trauma Informed Care Liaison and trainer at Northwest Journey Day Treatment in Wisconsin for many years. She currently works at Osceola Elementary School and is completing her masters at UW Superior in school counseling.