WELCOME TO MELBOURNE ART THERAPY STUDIO
Melbourne Art Therapy Studio is dedicated to providing people with the opportunity to discover their creative potential through art therapy and to enhance their mental health and well-being. Established in 2005 at the Abbotsford Convent in Melbourne, the studio offers a unique model of high-quality art therapy services to the community. The services provided by our professionally registered art therapists include individual sessions, group therapy, workshops, and team building activities. We have curated highly successful group and solo exhibitions, both at the Convent and other galleries.
The studio's location is at the Abbotsford Convent in Melbourne.
Art therapy is a way of getting to know yourself better through the process of art making, and exploring the work you've created. You may choose to just make art and not talk, or just talk and not make art & anything in-between.
Meet The Team
Robyn deVries (AThR)
Robyn co-founded the Melbourne Art Therapy Studio in 2005. She regularly facilitates groups, both at the Studio and elsewhere. She has over 20 year's experience working with addictions, in schools, in palliative care, in general mental heath, aged care, with autism and neurodivergence and many other sectors. She facilitated workshops for the internationally renowned School of Life, taught at Ikon Institute of Australia and sees many amazing people in individual sessions in the Studio. Robyn's clinical style include assisting people to tap into self compassion and judgements, to play, to explore, to be curious, to push boundaries and to break the rules, but not the law.
Robyn completed a diploma in Gestalt Therapy in 2006. She also holds a Masters in Art in Public Space.
Erica Mainprize (AThR)
Erica has been a practising art therapist since she graduated from La Trobe University over ten years ago. Much of her work has been in the overlapping area of brain injury and mental health, mostly in the role of honorary therapist at the Royal Talbot Rehabilitation Centre in Kew. She has also worked with a range of community-based participants, dealing with a great variety of knotty life challenges. In her own art making Erica enjoys experimenting with unfamiliar media. This wandering-tinkering helps her to support participants to find their own sweet spot where discoveries can be made.
Nina Young (AThR)
Nina is an art therapist and counsellor. She has worked in the arts for many years, including remote Indigenous community art centres, which inspired her art practice. She works with children and adults with a range of presentations and in cross-cultural contexts. Her eclectic practice incorporates elements of psychodynamic, mindful, phenomenological, and behaviour-based approaches to art therapy. She believes the visual process provides an important encounter with the self, an exploration deepened through the therapeutic alliance.
Professionalism, authenticity, and imagination are essential in her practice, and she works with participants to encourage self-awareness and growth through the creative process.
