BIOGRAPHY
Kathryn Snyder, PhD, MA, ATR-BC, LPC, believes art therapy is an essential aspect of health care for children and families.
Clinical Practice
Dr. Snyder is a board-certified art therapist and licensed professional counselor with a 24+ year clinical career working with children, teens, families, and adults. Her private practice, Parent to Child, has provided comprehensive art therapy and family support since 2007. She also founded Spark Art Therapy, a nonprofit that provides grant-funded art therapy services to youth within school settings.
Her expertise includes child development; learning disabilities and neurodevelopmental disorders such as ADHD and Autism; anxiety and depression; a family systems approach to working with children and teens; and community-based therapy practice. She takes a holistic view of the systems of care that children and teens are involved in, including their educational and health care settings. Her clinical practice focuses on coordinating care across these diverse systems, to bridge language barriers and prioritize the sensory and developmental needs of children and teens.
Through her research and private practice, Dr. Snyder works to embed art therapy into schools and museums, reducing barriers and increasing access to mental health care.
Research
In 2023, Dr. Snyder completed her PhD in Creative Arts Therapies at Drexel University under Dr. Girija Kaimal. Dr. Snyder’s PhD research focused on the clinical practice of art therapy with preschool-aged children in a high-needs preschool setting. She looked at how art therapy supports emergent literacy through visual-motor integration and expressive language/narrative development.
As a fellow under Dr. Kaimal, Dr. Snyder also participated in research projects focused on art therapy in pediatric cancer care, military art therapy, VR in art therapy, and visual tools in public health research.
Dr. Snyder’s current research focuses on the importance of child-development-centered practices, such as arts-integration in education and art therapy in an early intervention model. She is also researching the impact of art therapy in museum settings.
Consulting & Teaching
Additionally, Dr. Snyder has consulted with schools and other arts education settings to improve social and emotional learning, increase mental health services, and create trauma-informed classrooms. Her work with the Philadelphia Museum of Art sparked a research mentorship with Dr. Laura-Edythe Colemen in the Museum Studies Department at Drexel University.
Dr. Snyder has taught at the graduate and undergraduate level at Drexel University, Temple University, and Moore College of Art and Design. She has supervised many graduate students and therapists who are working toward their credentials, and she currently supervises a team of therapists who work for her group private practice.