Creative Director & Lead Creative Collaborator InterConnected

Over the course of Alex’s career, spanning over two decades, she has both led and collaborated in the creation and implementation of distinguished arts education and therapeutic programs nationally. For six years, Alex collaborated in SPARC’s Live Art Program as both special educator and teaching artist. During this time, Alex also facilitated the collaboration between SPARC and the UMFS residential and day school programs, bringing the myriad therapeutic benefits of theater to highly traumatized youth, as well as recruiting and supporting youth in joining the Live Art program over a four year span and managing the partnership between the organizations.

In 2013, Alex collaborated with an incredible group of Richmond artists and activists to create, design and facilitate “RVA Stories,” a creative arts based program, serving some of Richmond's most vulnerable youth who endure the daily impacts of pervasive and unrelenting racism. “RVA Stories” was a collaboration between Cadence Theater Company, The Visual Arts Center of Richmond and Alex's company, Richmond Center for the Creative Arts and Healing, in the effort to provide students the opportunity, together with a team of inspired artists and activists supporting and guiding them, to explore themselves and their connections to their communities through visual art, music and writing, with the supports of yoga and drumming and to build self awareness, shared empathic experience, community awareness, connection, resilience and JOY all through art making conversations, processes and expressions in performance.

In August 2017, Alex was trained in the “Miss Kendra” model of drama therapy intervention for trauma, dealing head on with the impacts of trauma, through conversation, drama therapy and letter writing processes, at The Post Traumatic Stress Center, New Haven, Ct. and implemented the model in The Charterhouse Day School Elementary Program (UMFS) during the 2017-2018 school year. Over the course of 2 years (2009-2011,) Alex received two consecutive grants from the Richmond Jewish Foundation, Rachel B. Banks Youth Fund, in partnership with Donna Peters, Director of the Weinstein JCC preschool program, to incorporate drama therapy into all sixteen preschool classrooms as well as lead teacher trainings and parent education forums regarding the importance of symbolic, embodied “play” in healthy child development.

Alex received her BFA from New York University, where she studied acting at the Stella Adler Conservatory for four years and received the Stella Adler Award for Outstanding Achievement upon graduation. Following her career as a professional actor in New York, Los Angeles and Europe, Alex found her passion for utilizing the arts in healing and earned an MA in Counseling Psychology with a focus in Drama Therapy from the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, CA. and continued training through the Institute for the Arts in Psychotherapy (San Francisco and NYC.) Following two decades of working in psychiatric hospital, residential, school and community based mental health settings, serving various populations, Alex can now be found at Launchpad Counseling, LLC in Richmond VA. serving her clients with a focus on trauma informed, wellness and strengths based interventions.