BIO
Personal Profile
Amy DiGennaro is a professional artist and helper based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, whose primary studio practice is drawing. DiGennaro was a 2005 recipient of the Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant and in 2007-2008, was awarded the prestigious McKnight Visual Arts Fellowship. She has exhibited her work locally and nationally and has been a professor of art and art history since 1996. She earned her BFA from Syracuse University in 1990, and her MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University in 1998. Between degrees, Amy completed the American Arts Course at Sotheby's in New York City. Although the primary focus of her art and education has been painting and drawing, Amy has also concentrated on art history, theory and criticism, and has created work in printmaking, ceramics, performance, sound and video. In 2014, she earned an MA in counseling psychology focused on Art and Marriage & Family Therapies. DiGennaro has an independent practice as a Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist since 2014. Her work as a somatic art and narrative trauma therapist is radical, anti-pathologizing, justice-doing, solidarity work that seeks to stand against the Medical-Industrial Complex and its effects and support people to deconstruct problem/failure stories and re-author alternative stories that support living lives in preferred (creative, life-giving) ways.
Education
2019-2021
Somatic Experiencing® International
Certification program in Somatic Experiencing® (SE™), a body-oriented therapeutic model applied based on a multidisciplinary intersection of physiology, psychology, ethology, biology, neuroscience, indigenous healing practices, and medical biophysics clinically applied for more than four decades. It is the life’s work of Dr. Peter A. Levine. The SE approach releases traumatic shock, which is key to transforming PTSD and the wounds of emotional and early developmental attachment trauma. It offers a framework to assess where a person is “stuck” in the fight, flight or freeze responses and provides clinical tools to resolve these fixated physiological states.
2010-2018
Narrative Therapy Training
Evanston Family Therapy Center, Yearlong Intensive Narrative Certificate Course, Evanston, IL,
Eight-person cohort certificate program in Narrative theory and practice taught by Jill Freedman, MSW and Gene Combs, MD, 2013.
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Evanston Family Therapy Center, Yearlong Advanced Narrative Practice Group, Evanston, IL, Eight-person cohort advanced narrative practice group in Narrative theory and practice led by Jill Freedman, MSW and Gene Combs, MD, 2014-2018.
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Evanston Family Therapy Center, The Craft and Art of Narrative Therapy Enquiry with David Epston. Evanston, IL, Two-day intensive training with narrative therapy co-founder, David Epston, 2015
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Kenwood Therapy Center, Narrative Therapy Spring Intensive: Addressing Trauma with Individuals, Families and Communities, Minneapolis, MN
Week-long intensive Narrative Therapy workshop/training , with David Denborough, Director of Dulwich Center, Adelaide, Australia, 2011
2007-2014
Master of Counseling Psychology
Adler Graduate School, MA in Counseling Psychology with specializations in Art Therapy and Marriage and Family Therapy, Minneapolis, MN. My practice combines narrative, art therapy, Buddhist and Adlerian approaches, 2014.