By: Teghan McIntyre, MS Art Therapy Student

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Nicole Rainey (M.S. ’15), a Licensed Mental Health Counselor and Registered Art Therapist, is a graduate of Florida State University’s art therapy master’s program who has dedicated her career to integrating creativity and clinical care. Through her private practice based in Tallahassee, FL, Mosaic Creative Counseling, she provides individualized therapy services designed to meet clients’ unique emotional and psychological needs. In the following interview, she reflects on her professional journey, the realities of private practice, and the meaningful ways she helps clients find healing and resilience through creative expression. 

To begin, Nicole shared a bit about her journey to becoming a Licensed Mental Health Counselor and Registered Art Therapist. 

“My whole life, I always enjoyed two things: art and helping people. Growing up, I would go back and forth between “I want to be an art teacher, or a therapist when I grow up.” In my undergraduate career, I majored in studio art and psychology. My original dream vision was to build a large house on beautiful acreage of land for trauma survivors to recover using creative modalities like art, music, nature, yoga, animals, etc. During undergrad, I learned more about the field of art therapy. I knew that was the missing link for me, so I went to FSU’s amazing art therapy program for grad school. I had wonderful internships, classes, professors, and colleagues who helped shape my career journey. After graduation in 2015, I had amazing mentors and supervisors who challenged me, encouraged me and supported me as I pursued licensure for mental health counseling and becoming a registered art therapist. In 2017, after 2 years of post-grad supervision, I became a Licensed Mental Health counselor and Registered Art Therapist.” 

Nicole’s time at FSU shaped her, both personally and professionally, by giving her confidence in herself and in the creative process. 

“At FSU, I was challenged to research, facilitate, and experience first-hand the healing power of creativity. The curriculum in Art Therapy is driven by research, and students are encouraged to trust the process with clients. Each class also challenges students to engage in their own art therapy process first, so that we can be a field that practices what we preach.” 

Nicole’s internship/practicum experiences solidified interest in art therapy. 

“In my internships, I got to practice art therapy with many diverse clients. I was lucky enough to have internships in the local schools, prisons, and state hospitals. Helping people actually find healing through art got me hooked on art therapy!” 

Her education at FSU gave her the clinical foundation that she needed to feel confident in the therapy room. 

“After graduation, I felt confident in working with diverse clients and using art to help people heal. That foundation gave me the ability to pursue more specialized training in trauma modalities like EMDR
(Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), and gave me the motivation to build my own practice.” 

Nicole was inspired to open her own private practice after her experiences working in non-profit positions. 

“I spent the first 5 years of my career working with sexual abuse and sex trafficking survivors. This was extremely fulfilling. However, these nonprofits repeatedly lost funding for these programs and services. I saw what that did to a community of people who found help, and then had it snatched away because of bureaucracy they couldn’t control. That is when my original dream came back to life, and I decided to open my own practice with many different creative therapies available to our community. I wanted a space that was my own and that no one could take away again because of funding or bureaucracy. I wanted a space that was full of creative healing that wasn’t dictated by insurance requirements, grant wording, or other red tape. I wanted a creative healing space that was truly focused on clients.” 

As a former FSU art therapy master’s student, she shared some advice for current or future FSU students interested in art therapy. 

“For anyone interested in pursuing art therapy, I have 2 recommendations: 1. Invest in your own healing work as you enter the field. Therapists often get into this role because we care, but while we hate to hear it, sometimes we have our own unfinished healing. I want to encourage any student who is interested in becoming an art therapist to go to therapy, work on themselves, learn to enforce boundaries, heal their past traumas, build meaningful relationships, and practice their own creative outlets. Do your own work, and you’ll be a great art therapist! 2. Internships and Supervisors have the biggest impact on the kind of therapist you will become. Don’t choose the easy internship, choose the one you’re most interested in, you might even choose the one you’re most afraid of… your internships are the only client experience you’ll get before you’re released into the wild! Choose an internship that will build your confidence, not make for an easy semester. Find a supervisor whom you respect. The feedback your supervisor gives will shape who you become in your career. Don’t just accept free supervision if you are not getting your needs met. Find a supervisor who fits your style, makes you feel challenged and supported, and does the kind of clinical work you want to do one day!” 

Nicole provided clarity on the differences between private practice and other therapeutic spaces. 

“For the clients, private practice forms a long-lasting relationship with their therapist. When a client works with a therapist who is in private practice, they typically have a relationship with that therapist for as long as they need, often years and sometimes decades! Choosing to work with a private practice therapist gives the client more freedom and control over their healing journey, because administrative staff, leadership boards, and funders are not dictating treatment due to random policies. For example, when I worked in agencies and other therapeutic spaces, I would have clients occasionally show up 15 minutes late to sessions. Well, because of the policies and insurance guidelines, after 15 minutes, that client would be counted as a no-show and be billed for the full session. Now in private practice, if a client is late, I say, “Come on in! Glad you made it!” I once had a client who scheduled a virtual session, but their internet was down (through no fault of their own), and because of the policies, I had to charge them a no-show fee. Now, in private practice, if something similar happened, I could just offer to do a telephone session. What I love most about private practice is that I can truly meet people where they are at.” 

Nicole shared what she believes makes Mosaic Creative Counseling unique compared to other therapy practices. 

“I believe what makes us unique is our commitment to our 5 core values: Providing accessible and quality therapy services, a diverse team with niche expertise, being a collaborative part of the community, having a growth mindset and vision, and demonstrating creativity and innovation.” 

To conclude the interview, Nicole described what excites her most about the future of Mosaic Creative Counseling. 

“In a world that is becoming more and more digital, I think the therapy field is at risk of falling into that virtual trap. However, we are already seeing the negative impact of screens, isolation, AI fake therapists, and technology on our nervous system. However, I think Mosaic will offer a unique breath of fresh air by staying rooted in creativity and holistic approaches that take people back into their bodies with movement, creativity, and connection. At Mosaic, therapy and healing have always been about more than sitting still and talking. I am excited to see the endless possible growth of this. I want to see our services and team expand to offer more holistic wellness services like mental health retreats, wellness workshops, community art therapy groups, etc. In a world that is often plugged into a virtual reality, Mosaic is offering a chance to feel alive again through art making, play, yoga, music, animal therapy, and genuine, vulnerable connection.” 

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To learn more about Mosaic Creative Counseling and their mission, please visit MosaicCreativeCounseling.com.

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PhD students from the Department of Art Education transformed their research process into visual interpretation and created experiences for visitors to engage with under the exhibition “Warp & Weft” at the WJB Gallery. Four current museum education and visitor-centered curation doctoral students Ashley Williams, Audrey Jacobs, Dianna Bradley and Zoe Hume participated along with Catherine Usewicz, PhD, a recent art education graduate.

Inspired by The Ohio State University’s research incubator and collective, trace, layer, play, and the theoretical concept of communities of practice, this exhibition transformed the WJB Gallery into a learning lab where visitors experienced visual representations of the researchers’ dissertations and co-created within the exhibition’s interactives. Like doctoral students at OSU’s Department of Arts Administration, Education and Policy program, the doctoral students began the “Warp & Weft” research collective to support each other through their respective academic journeys. The group originally came together when fellow doctoral student, Paul Gabbard, brought up trace, layer, play, as a model for doctoral community building, a framework that resonated with their existing Sunday writing group. Every other Sunday, the researchers met over Zoom to share their dissertation process and ideas for the exhibition. They would share a bloom (something we’re working on, or coming up), a rose (something positive), and a thorn (a challenge we’re having).

“For the exhibition, each of us developed projects that visualized an aspect of our own dissertation topic and/or research process, giving form to the often intangible work of academic inquiry,” explained the researchers. “Together, these works invite visitors into the doctoral experience, from coursework to public defense. We hope the exhibition highlights our experiences, while also demystifying what the doctoral process might look like.”

Their voices, research interests, and subjectivities have been embodied and materialized in the interactive activities: Ashley focused on role-playing and invited visitors to experience curation by arranging the works of art she created using literature she read and photos from Florida State University. Zoe focused on a sense of belonging and how research is a block-building process with prompts for people to engage with art-making and writing with hanging rings and blocks. Catherine displayed how she transformed the interview data about her research into visual narratives and invited visitors to participate under relevant themes. Audrey demonstrated the pedagogical model for visitors to interact with and ponder questions about collaboration between schools and museums. Dianna showed the basket she built from the studies she read to reflect on the meaning-making journey in the literature review. She also invited people to create a heart basket interwoven with two pieces of paper, where they can be prompted to reflect on their passions and identities, or on other thoughts, and document it on the heart. In addition, the researchers also collectively provided a panel with different research themes for visitors to develop their own research topics. Here, we learn more about their exhibition-developing process and reflection:

“One of the most rewarding parts of this experience for me has been the increased sense of community. As we discuss in our exhibition, doctoral research can be a really isolating and lonely process, so creating space to come together through dialogue was really powerful. Having the opportunity to then literally bring our research together in an exhibition was a fun and creative method of pushing beyond the sense of community Warp & Weft created to invite the entire FSU community to be part of our journeys.”
-Zoe Hume

“I really enjoyed the process of working together to show different ways we visually think of this doctoral journey. I resonated with Ashley’s process of moving sections and ideas around – as if curating the dissertation. I think the exhibition highlights how unique the process is even when taking the same steps to complete it.”
-Dianna Bradley

“When I first joined the program, I knew that collaborative work was an aspect I wanted to make integral to my experience. I wanted to avoid the prospect of being an island, which has often been the feeling as an art teacher. I also wanted to explore the intersections of each of our works and celebrate the diverse approaches we all brought to the installation.”
-Catherine Usewicz

“My work at the intersection of formal (school) and informal (museum) learning has often led me to think about what these environments have in common and how they can work across organizational differences. My PhD research aims to visualize the learning that happens through this kind of work. In the exhibition, I was asking everyone to make those processes and features visible with me through how they think art museums and schools can combine forces in education.”
-Audrey Jacobs

“I appreciated the sense of community we built leading up to the exhibition. Since most of us are not on campus, meeting over Zoom helped us maintain the connections we formed during the coursework phase of the doctoral program. It was incredibly rewarding to see the ideas and prototypes everyone had shared over the past several months come together in the gallery. I thought it was interesting how each of us developed entirely different activities and works of art. Even though we’re all navigating the dissertation process, our art and gallery activities reflect how varied everyone’s doctoral journey can be.”
-Ashley Williams

Engaging different stages of the research processes not in a scholarly paper but through interactive activities may also shed light on how we can think about these topics creatively and what possibilities it may bring to us.