Community | DvT San Francisco

Bay Area DvT Practitioners & Affiliates

Alicia Stephen - Training Director and Lead Faculty

Alicia lives bi-coastally between California and Connecticut, USA, traveling to therapize, teach, supervise, and facilitate workshops.

She is the Founder of the Center for Healing Trauma in California and a Senior Trauma Clinician at the Post Traumatic Stress Center at West Rock Wellness in Connecticut, where she provides trauma-centered training for therapists and drama therapy for survivors of gun violence and sexual assault.

Beyond being her work, DvT has also been a special place of care and community, a space to come home to her body, to find respite and refuge—a place to play, to co-regulate, to be seen, to reckon with the wreckage of traumatic grief, to process her own experiences of trauma alongside others.

As you can see, she does far too many things, is painfully incapable of choosing just one because she loves them all, is delightfully but also horrifyingly scatterbrained, loves people but also—utterly terrified of them, and is—yours truly—a broken toy.

Offers: Faculty Supervision, DvT Training Intensives, Program Consultation, DvT Training Therapy & DvT Supervision

Hannah LaDoceur - Core Faculty

I am registered Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist with the state of California (#120221). I have a Masters in Counseling Psychology with a concentration in Drama Therapy from California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, and a BA in Theatre Arts from Suffolk University in Boston. I am a Certified Practitioner Developmental Transformations with iWest in San Francisco, California.

For the past 12 years I have worked in community based mental health for Edgewood Center for Children and families working in residential programs, schools, and home settings with children ages 5-18 and their families. I started my private practice in 2022, working with children, young adults, and adults.

Offers: DvT Therapy for adults and kids, Dvt Training Therapy for students, DvT Supervision

Aileen B Cho - Former Training Director & Visiting Faculty

Conceived as a majorly imaginative child who then went on to major in Theatre with a focus in Psychology at UC San Diego. Born as a drama therapist at CIIS. Pruned and grown in iWest. Rooted in both SF and Los Angeles. Multiplying back at CIIS in her Hydra-like role as Department Chair of the DT program at CIIS. Decomposing — and recomposing — daily in her role as: Mother by her two children who outplay her.Every. Single. Day.

Aileen was first DvT-therapized in 2011 and began practicing herself in 2013. She has been faculty at iWest and has taught DvT at CIIS since 2015, alongside supervising DvT trainees in Taiwan and teaching/training DvT practitioners in Hong Kong. She currently teaches Special Methods in Drama Therapy: Intro to DvT I and DvT II at CIIS. She is a 2nd-gen bilingual, bicultural Korean-American woman who is also fluent in DvTingalese, which is to say: she contains multitudes, contradictions, and at least three inside jokes per conversation that only make sense in all three languages at once. A fable holds that pre-DvT, she was not a real human being. Now — depending on who you ask, and on which day — she might be. Aileen also may or may not be available for DvT training, therapy, and supervision, depending on what her wildly unstable schedule looks like.

Offers: DvT Supervision

Chris Kammler - Visiting Faculty

Chris Kammler was birthed from the primordial ooze of iWest before there was an I West, before

poa, before Text 3, before a following,

before Before. Since,

she has traveled the world carrying her pocket playspace, playing with the recursive cycle in new languages and delving deeply into the unknown. Now she is a performance poet, writer, and DvT therapist working in adult inpatient psych, available for training therapy and self-revelatory directing

Offers: DvT Training Therapy

Erinn Webb - Training Director of DvT Boston

Erinn (she/her) has been practicing DvT since 2012, and has been a faculty member of DvT Boston since 2020. A graduate of Montreal and New York DvT Institutes, Erinn has had the chance to play with many people of all ages from all over the world.

Erinn’s passion for play has been lifelong. She through DvT, has found new ways to understand infertility, sexuality, motherhood, and existential dread.

Offers: Virtual DvT Supervision, DvT Training Therapy in Connecticut

Kimberly Koljat - Visiting Faculty

I work primarily with grief, trauma, people pleasers, and folks in the music industry. I am a master's-level psychotherapist with extensive leadership experience, specializing in relational, trauma-informed therapy for individuals, couples, families, children, and creatives. My approach integrates psychodynamic therapy, Developmental Transformations (DvT), grief support, and play therapy.

Offers: DvT Training Therapy Intensives, DvT Virtual Supervision

Samira Sheahan - DvT Practitioner

Awarded the "Exceptionally Weird Human" title in her DvT cohort (yes, this took hours of grueling extracurricular training), Samira is an actor^therapist in community mental health who loves to work^play with focuses on trauma and culture. A graduate of CIIS like most DvT-ers in Ohlone and Lisjan homelands, she also loves to live on both coasts of this here continent, traveling between ~Home 1 in DC and ~Home 2 in the Bay. (East Bay, less h'ish'ly.) ^And then there is a ~Home 3 across the Pacific. So, there is some x'i as to her presence in this geographic area.

In addition to DvT and general drama therapy, Samira loves voice and movement techniques originally designed for actors that it turns out apply to all of us. She is an assistant member of the international "trems" network (Trems, noun - one who tremors - one who is certified in the practice of Fitzmaurice Voicework®), and will happily talk and sing theory with you and apply it to play. Checking in with the body, and how it is supporting the voice, and how the voice is feeding back into it - and how all of that is feeding into our own and others' recursive cycles. If you struggle with or are curious about or simply love vocal and physical techniques, we should possibly encounter.

Samira is open to teatime-style chats and the occasional DvT workshop on which to collaborate. She feels she has deconstructed DvT far too much in her work with 2-to-twelve-year-old's to offer it with any reasonable veracity as "therapy" to anyone over that age.

Offers: Conversations about DvT! Voice training and other cool things!

Marcia Aguilar - Visiting Faculty & Training Therapist

Marcia Aguilar Kailian (she/they) is a Queer Chicana multi-disciplinary theater maker, Registered Drama Therapist, DvT Practitioner, and Improvisation Teacher exploring the intersection of theater and therapeutic practices.

With a rich background in improvisation, Marcia performs and teaches Full Spectrum Improvisation in the Bay Area, directs self revelatory performances and runs DvT based play groups!

Offers: DvT Group Therapy, DvT Training therapy for Students, DvT Based Self Rev Director

Marie Broadway - Visiting Faculty & Training Therapist

Marie has practiced DvT since 2016, including working in the foster care system, in ED programs, and facilitating workshops on creativity and fiction writing. With a particular interest in early childhood development, Marie offers DvT sessions and training therapy.

Offers: Individual DvT Therapy, Couples DvT Therapy, DvT Training Therapy for Students

Sarah Pizer Bush - Visiting Faculty & DvT Supervisor

"Sarah" loves DvT - theory and practice. It informs her clinical work, who she is as a supervisor, along with her personal relationships, ways of being, and artistic practices. She's been DvTing since she started her drama therapy journey in 2011. It began when she accidentally found a DvT therapist to work with, extended into her first practicum, enticed her to New Haven, and now it informs the culture building and supervision style she brings to her work in community-based mental health. She was raised on Textbook for Practitioners 2, and has a love for the ethics of the playspace, recursive cycle, broken toy, and so much more. She is very curious about Textbook for Practitioner 3 - what is all this about Zo and nooks and crannies, tell me more! She also loves dying in the playspace, nerding out, all forms of awkwardness, over-validation, discrepancy, and singing in and out of the playspace. If there is a place to end the bio, it is now. Or is it now?

Offers: DvT Supervision, DvT Based Self Rev Director