What are you looking for?
Find your path to an expressive arts coaching career at CIIS.
Combining artistic practice with personal growth, expressive arts coaching is a field for people who want to help others unlock imagination, overcome obstacles, and express themselves more fully in their work and lives.
Unlike therapy, coaching does not diagnose. Instead, it favors a collaborative process of creating goal setting and change.
If you are considering this path, here are four essential steps to begin your journey.
Strengthening your own creative foundation can help you prepare to guide others. A regular practice such as writing, painting, dance, music, or performance can deepen creative flow, reduce resistance, and foster renewal. And pursuing your artwork and dealing with rejection and success as an artist can be important for understanding others’ experience and empathizing with them. This self-awareness underpins the empathy and insight you will use as a coach.
By studying the basics of active listening, goal setting, accountability, and feedback, prospective coaches understand the value of how people can clarify and design steps toward their vision. Degree programs that offer coursework in teaching, facilitation, mentoring or coaching, or even short-term certifications or mentorships with experienced coaches can help you build a solid foundation on which to layer an expressive arts focus.
Creativity involves both the mind and the body. To help ourselves and others navigate fear or burnout, you can study how creativity interacts with motivation, emotion, and physical presence. Courses in creativity research, mindfulness, and trauma-informed facilitation can prepare you to guide others through emotional and somatic aspects of their creative process.
A respectful and safe environment helps creativity thrive. Practitioners can support this direction by creating clear boundaries between coaching and therapy, adopting a professional code of ethics, and/or being clear about their ethics and their relationships to those they are coaching, committing to inclusive practice, and making your sessions accessible and consent-based, whether online or in-person.
This online master’s program trains students to integrate creative expression with coaching. The four-semester format combines online coursework with immersive virtual intensives. The program draws on expressive arts, narrative approaches, and liberation psychology to explore how creativity strengthens people with students learning to apply arts-based methods to coaching, community building, and social change.
This program offers direct preparation for a career in creative arts coaching. It provides training in working with individuals and groups via expressive methods. The curriculum builds essential coaching skills like communication, reflection, and accountability, all through a creative lens. With this curriculum, graduates are explicitly prepared for careers as private coaches, community arts leaders, or organizational change agents.
The M.A. in Counseling Psychology with a concentration in Expressive Arts Therapy program integrates counseling and the arts. Students learn to apply and adapt a range of narrative, dance/movement, drama, music, art, and poetry therapy methods into mental health practice. The curriculum is rooted in person-centered, culturally responsive care and liberation psychology, with a high standard of self-awareness and self-care.
The MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts and Writing brings together artists, writers, and performers who want to explore artmaking across disciplines, mediums, and forms. This interdisciplinary focus distinguishes our MFA from others; it strengthens your ability to work across mediums, reflect on your own creative habits, and guide others through similar experiences.
The program’s highly collaborative structure is based on the idea that artists don't create alone and that interacting with other artists supports each in more fully engaging and realizing their work and expands their perspectives on artmaking. Graduates are well-prepared to make their own artistic careers, but also to guide other aspiring artists toward building confidence and having a sense of artistic identity.
Our graduates pursue careers as therapists, coaches, working artists, and community change agents, merging a deep foundation in learning styles and/or psychology with the freedom to practice in many contexts. You will learn how to create safe spaces for expression, manage emotional responses that can arise during expressive arts work, and apply trauma-informed approaches. These abilities help you to support clients with care and professionalism as they use creativity for growth and transformation.
In any path you choose, CIIS prepares students for a successful career in expressive arts coaching by grounding you in both creative practice and relational skills. Each program supports students in developing self-awareness, ethical judgment, and the ability to work with others through creativity in a way that is responsive and responsible. Graduates leave prepared to guide individuals and groups as they use creative expression to explore meaning, navigate change, and grow with intention.
Integral education for therapists, thought leaders, creatives, and activists since 1968.
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