June 25, 2025
The American Art Therapy Association represents a diversity of professionals, students, and organizations across the nation. We recognize and celebrate the work of our members at all levels through our Featured Member series.
What excites you most about your job right now?
Using qualitative methods of research about creative expression to harvest deeply personal yet possibly universal human experiences.
What are your hopes for the future of the art therapy profession?
My hope is that art therapy can be a powerful tool for generating qualitative data that can inform more effective strategies in the recovery from hidden patterns of coercive control, which can include cults, gangs, domestic violence, and human trafficking.
This is a personal reflection on the power of words. The misuse of words can bind someone’s mind up. Constriction reflects in their limited body and life movement. The presence of one safe and skilled person who has the insight to see and encourage can help sort through all the words that hold movement back.
(A personal note: I was honored to have this piece shown for the first time at the ICSA conference in 2023. Prior to the showing I hung my work in my hotel room to let it speak with me as I have been taught to do as an Adlerian Art Therapist. As I reflected on this painting I had a massive perception shift. When I painted it I resonated most with the woman reaching out in the picture. Throughout time I realized I’ve also become the person holding the light and the scissors.)
“Work to make space to listen to your own heart journey and maximize on your strengths. When you find others who resonate with your work, keep them close. They do not necessarily have to be art therapists. I see research as advocacy in that it can be transformative and authentically life-changing.”
— Natalee Bigger Stockdale MA, ATR-BC, LPCC, NCC
How have race, diversity, and/or social justice impacted your work as an art therapy student?
Diversity factors are dynamic and also aid and influence me in my practice. I see many clients who are in blended families. There are over 200 different combinations of blended family members, all face different types of challenges. Being informed, compassionate, and present to these different challenges has broadened my capabilities as an art therapist.
About Natalee Bigger Stockdale MA, ATR-BC, LPCC, NCC
Natalee Bigger Stockdale completed her master’s degree from Adler Graduate School in 2020. She is a Board-Certified Art Therapist and Licensed Professional Clinical Counselor in the state of Minnesota. She currently works in private practice and specializes in working with clients who have experienced complex trauma. She understands the complex nature of exiting a cultic group and the labor that recovery entails. She works to bring attuning sensitivity, along with evidence based multimodal therapeutic models, to her clients with gentleness. Natalee is passionate about sharing her knowledge and skills with other survivors and the professionals working with them. Natalee aims to promote awareness of the unique struggles in recovery from complex trauma, coercive control, and self-alienation through ways art therapy can foster healing.
Learn more about Natalee on her LinkedIn here.