Enhancing Skills in Art, Drama, and Therapeutic Writing for Professionals Working with Children who are Grieving
Join us for an enriching and immersive half-day Creative Arts Intensive, specially designed for professionals working in the children’s bereavement field. This unique event is an opportunity to engage in specialized workshops across three key areas – art, drama, and therapeutic writing. Each session is designed to be highly interactive and experiential, allowing you to apply creative techniques in real-time. This intensive is ideal for educators, therapists, counselors, and anyone in the field of child bereavement support looking to learn creative strategies to support them in their work.
The event has a limited number of spots to ensure a quality experience and personalized attention. Early registration is encouraged to secure your participation. Conveniently scheduled at the end of our symposium, this half-day event allows for efficient time use without incurring additional travel expenses.
Join us to expand your creative strategies and make a lasting impact in your practice.
Our Presenters:
Lauren Raney,
LCPC, ATR
Donna Schuurman,
EdD, FT
Adam D-F. Stevens,
MA, RDT/BCT, LCAT-P
Stephanie Omens,
LCAT, LMHC, LPC, RDT-BCT, CCLS
Cost
The cost includes lunch, the reception, session attendance, and Continuing Education credits. Registration closes April 26, 2026.
NACG Members – $175
Non-Member – $200
Not a member? NACG annual membership starts as low as $125. We would love to have you join us. Learn more and join HERE. If you need support in joining, please reach out to us at info@nacg.org, and we will be happy to help.
Schedule
1:15pm to 2:15pm CT | Grief Has a Body: Trauma-Informed, Embodied Art-Making to Support Children Bereaved by Traumatic Loss (1 CE pending)
2:30pm to 3:30pm CT | Write it Out! An Interactive Writing Workshop (1 CE pending)
3:45pm to 4:45pm CT | Unscripted Truth: Drama Therapy Tools for Speaking the Unspeakable in Childhood Grief (1 CE pending)
Session Information
Presented by: Lauren Raney, LCPC, ATR
Grief—especially following sudden or traumatic loss —is often held in the body before it can be spoken. Bereaved children may experience heightened nervous system activation, confusion, shame, and a sense of unsafety in their bodies, requiring approaches that extend beyond talk-based interventions. This art therapy workshop offers participants a trauma-informed, body-based approach to supporting grieving children through large-scale, embodied art-making. Grounded in principles of safety, choice, pacing, and empowerment, participants will engage in an experiential process using drawing materials and oversized paper placed on the floor, wall, or table. These materials will help us explore how movement, body orientation, and the tactile sensation of mark-making can help children externalize grief while maintaining emotional containment and regulation. Special attention will be given to working sensitively with traumatic loss—addressing stigma, ambivalence, and unanswerable questions—without requiring children to disclose details or verbalize meaning before they are ready.
Learning Objectives:
- Understand how traumatic grief is experienced somatically in children.
- Learn trauma-informed principles for facilitating embodied art-making safely.
- Experience a large-scale, body-based mixed-media directive and learn how to implement it into their practice with children and families.
- Develop language that supports choice, agency, and emotional regulation while reducing shame and retraumatization.
Presented by: Dr. Donna Schuurman
Writing can open doors that conversation sometimes can’t. In this interactive, hands-on workshop, participants will explore how guided writing can support meaning-making, reflection, and connection in the context of grief. Through gentle prompts, you’ll be invited to write about your own experience of grief in a way that feels safe and manageable. No writing experience is required. Participants frequently discover that the process itself is what matters, finding unexpected insight and grounding through the act of writing itself.
The workshop models a creative practice that can be adapted for use with teens and young adults, offering a tool that supports expression, connection, and emotional processing when words are hard to find.
Participants will leave with a deeper understanding of how writing can be used thoughtfully and flexibly in bereavement settings, and with ideas for bringing this approach into their own work.
Objectives:
- Complete at least two guided writing exercises and describe how the process supported insight, emotional processing, or meaning-making in their personal grief experience.
- Identify and articulate at least two strategies for adapting writing prompts and activities for use with grieving teens and young adults.
- Evaluate the impact of shared writing experiences on connection, normalization of grief, and group cohesion through group discussion or a brief written reflection.
Presented by: Adam D-F. Stevens (they|them), MA, RDT, BCT and Stephanie Omens, LCAT, LMHC, LPC, RDT-BCT, CCLS
Grief is not polite. It doesn’t sit still or stay quiet, and neither should the ways we help children navigate it. In this immersive workshop, drama therapists Stephanie Omens, author of Dramatherapy and the Bereaved Child (Routledge, 2024), and Adam Stevens, NACG board member and visionary grief worker, invite participants to step into the uncharted space where creative resistance meets therapeutic truth-telling.
Rooted in drama therapy and social justice, this session ignites practitioners to reimagine how children can safely explore loss, not only through talk, but through body, play, ritual, and improvisation. Participants will engage in up to three experiential, hands-on modules designed to deepen their toolkit for facilitating symbolic, embodied, and performative processes that honor the grief narratives of young people.
Expect scene work without scripts, rituals built on memory fragments, and embodied storytelling that welcomes rupture and repair. The workshop will also highlight clinical insights from Stephanie’s recent publication and Adam’s multicultural praxis, challenging dominant grief frameworks while equipping attendees with practical tools they can use in schools, hospitals, and community-based settings. This session isn’t just about new activities, it’s a call to revolutionize the way we hold space for children’s pain and resilience. Come prepared to move, feel, create, and leave with techniques that stay with you long after the stage lights dim.
Learning Objectives:
- Identify at least three drama therapy techniques that facilitate nonverbal expression of grief in children and adolescents, particularly those who are not yet ready or able to articulate their loss verbally.
- Demonstrate embodied and improvisational strategies for supporting meaning-making in grieving children, including movement-based rituals and symbolic role-play.
- Apply principles of trauma-informed and socially just grief practices to creative arts interventions, with attention to cultural humility and the unique needs of diverse communities.
- Design and facilitate a short, developmentally appropriate grief-support activity using drama therapy modalities, grounded in clinical theory and research-informed best practices.
- Evaluate how performance, storytelling, and collective ritual can disrupt pathologizing narratives around grief and foster resilience, connection, and self-agency in bereaved children.
