Background

Dr. Annie Ready Coffey specializes in the facilitation of healthy growth through the creative arts. She is guided by her conviction that we all have creative energies that can nourish and inform us. Indeed, Dr. Coffey has honored her own love of creative self-expression and nurtured the same in others for her entire adult life.

Prior to 1988, when her training and experience in clinical psychology began, Dr. Coffey taught three years of Language Arts to 5th and 6th graders in rural Vermont. Throughout her training (1988-1993), she spent two days a week at practicum sites where she either lead or co-lead creative arts therapy groups. During her final year of training, while interning at The Virginia Treatment Center for Children, Dr. Coffey contacted the Medical College of Virginia's director of Arts in the Hospitals and began a mobile/visiting "art, poems and stories" program on the pediatric floor for the Child Life Department. (After her internship, Dr. Coffey accepted an offer from Arts in the Hospitals to continue her work throughout the hospital.)

Dr. Coffey's creative arts therapies affiliations include membership in the National Association for Poetry Therapy since 1991, the National Association for Drama Therapy since 2002, and the International Expressive Arts Therapy Association since 2007; completing her study of the effectiveness of poetry therapy with sibling-bereaved adolescents for her doctoral dissertation in 1995; and, membership in the American Psychological Association's division of Psychology and The Arts since January 1999. In 1999, Dr. Coffey completed her training in the use and interpretation of an art-therapy based assessment called the MARI Card Assessment. Lastly, in May 2007, the National Association for Drama Therapy awarded Dr. Coffey the Registered Drama Therapist (RDT) credential (#364).

Always passionate about creative people and groups who are seeking replenishment and change, Dr. Coffey welcomes your questions and informal discussions about her services, so don't hesitate to contact her.

ph: (804) 256-9650
e-mail: anniecoffey@peapodarts.com
mail: Arts for Replenishment and Change
2800 Patterson Avenue
Suite 303
Richmond, VA 23221

Other Professional Hats

Between August 2001 and June 2007, Dr. Coffey facilitated a support group for the child clinical psychology interns who were completing their doctoral training through the Medical College of Virginia. She emphasized the importance of knowing and nurturing oneself on the road to becoming an effective and authentic therapist.

In conjunction with her role as the above-mentioned support group leader, Dr. Coffey was appointed Assistant Clinical Professor in the Department of Psychiatry of the Medical College of Virginia (a branch of Virginia Commonwealth University's Health System).

"...staying with your beauty, your truth, your integrity is difficult, but out of these things comes meaning, and meaning is all-transcendent." - Rod MacIver, founder of Heron Dance

In August 2001, Dr. Coffey was elected to the Board of Trustees of ART 180 - a Richmond, Virginia, non-profit organization which defines itself in part by stating, "ART 180 gives young people the chance to express themselves through art, and to share their stories with others." In the spring of 2003, Dr. Coffey completed an evaluation of one of ART 180's painting programs, and in the fall of 2003, she served as the liaison between the Program Committee and a mural and poetry program.

In July 2002, Dr. Coffey joined the Board of Jungian Venture, Richmond's society for the study and appreciation of Jungian Psychology. She assumed responsibility for JV's membership through June 2004, and coordinated a November 2004, event featuring Dr. Linda Leonard, a Jungian analyst, who presented on the topic of one of her latest books: "The Call to Create." Dr. Coffey's Jungian Venture Board term ended in January 2005.

In July 2002, Dr. Coffey began training to become a Registered Drama Therapist. She pursued her training through The Graduate Certificate Program in Transpersonal Drama Therapy which was co-founded by the late Dr. Penny Lewis and Saphira Linden, RDT.

In September 2003, Dr. Coffey began her Drama Therapy internship working with behaviorally disturbed school children at Thirteen Acres and Linwood Holton Elementary in Richmond, Virginia.

In May 2004 through August 2005, Dr. Coffey started her second internship with behaviorally and emotionally disturbed adolescents at the Charter House School at United Methodist Family Services also in Richmond, VA. She was delighted to be recognized for her creative contributions when she received grant funding for her services as a Drama Therapist-in-training. Dr. Coffey worked closely with the students and their art and music teachers to put on the students' play about influential historical characters entitled: "Takin' It Back."

Throughout the 2005-2006 school year, Dr. Coffey co-led an after-school combined art and drama therapy program at Ginter Park Elementary School entitled: "Portraits of Self and Community: From Spirit to Page to Stage." And since the fall of 2005, she has ben involved with William Fox Elementary School's after-school theatre program, Fox Theatrix, assisting with weekly classes and with spring productions of Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland. Beginning in the fall of 2007, Dr. Coffey will become one of two primary teachers and will focus on developing students' improvisational acting skills with the goal of having the students develop their own performance pieces.

Please contact me at anniecoffey@peapodarts.com