Our Training & Speakers Bureau

Marie-Nathalie Beaudoin, Ph.D., directs Skills for Kids, Parents & Schools (SKIPS), a 9-month intense narrative therapy, neurobiology, and mindfulness training program in California where she works with children, adults, families, and school communities. Before immersing herself in narrative therapy in the early 1990s, Marie-Nathalie had trained in Human Biology and Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction. She now brings together fields that have influenced her life and work for the last 30 years, and as a result, has pioneered narrative clinical practices to respond to distressing emotions and traumatic experiences. She has written over 50 professional articles and many books, such as the popular The SKiLL-ionaire in Every Child: Boosting Children’s Socio-emotional Skills using the latest in Brain Research (2010), written for parents, teachers, and counselors (French, English, Spanish). She has also co-authored Collaborative Therapies and neurobiology: Evolving practices in action (Beaudoin & Duvall, 2017), and Mindfulness in a busy world: Lowering barriers for youth & adults to cultivate focus, emotional peace & gratefulness (Beaudoin & Maki, 2021). Her latest book, which was co-authored with Gerald Monk and published by WW Norton, is Narrative Practices and Emotions: 40+ Ways to Support the Emergence of Flourishing Identities. It combines her lifelong passion for the immense possibilities inherent to our bodies and brains with novel narrative practices inspired by Interpersonal Neurobiology, Sensorimotor Therapy, and Positive Psychology. With a background in improvisational theater and dance, Marie-Nathalie is well-known for her thought-provoking and engaging presentations

Lucy Cotter is co-founder of the Narrative Counseling Center in L.A., California, providing psychotherapy, clinical supervision, and training. With an MFA as a painter and collage artist from Otis College of Art, she brings out-of-the-box, creative thinking to her psychotherapy clients' stories. Lucy’s passion for narrative therapy, art, and philosophy intersect in evolving ways. Her article series, Breaking The Frame: Aesthetic Encounters with Narrative Practices, is published by the Journal of Contemporary Narrative Therapy. As a professor at Antioch University, some of her courses include Postmodern Therapies, Couples Counseling, Brief Therapy, and Critical Psychology.

SuEllen Hamkins, MD is a psychiatrist specializing in college mental health and narrative therapy. Her passion is helping people thrive in the face of challenges and difficulties. Her book, The Art of Narrative Psychiatry (Oxford University Press, 2013), offers detailed guidance in resiliency-focused, culturally-attuned, collaborative mental health practice, bringing narrative approaches alive through vivid case reports. As Clinical Assistant Professor at UMass Chan Medical School, she cherishes her role in providing psychotherapy and psychiatric treatment to students, as well as offering psychotherapy supervision. She is a co-founder and co-author of The Mother-Daughter Project. SuEllen has presented at professional conferences around the world.

Sarah Beth Hughes works as a Couple and Family Therapist in Nelson, BC Canada. She was introduced to Narrative ideas through her work as the North American Distributor of Dulwich Publications throughout the 1990’s. She got the privilege of attending many of Michael White’s training and got inspired to do this kind of work herself. Along the way she also met many of Michael’s colleagues and friends including Peggy Sax who have helped her feed her passion for this work.

Rocio was born in Mexico. As a young child, Rocio migrated to California and lived as an undocumented person in California. Rocio's status and journey as an immigrant have informed her work with communities in California. Rocio has been involved in community work for most of her life. She obtained her master's in counseling in 2006 from San Diego State University and is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in California, She is passionate about questioning colonial practices in mental health and depathologizing mental health practices. For many years, Rocio worked at a non-profit community clinic, helping serve the most marginalized and impoverished communities. She has extensive practice with adolescents, having been a school counselor for 15 years. Rocio also provided short-term therapy for 15 years at an immigrant detention facility. Rocio has provided training, served as an adjunct professor, and supervised and worked with families and children. Helping people on the brink of Suicide and listening to people process sexual assault and trauma has been a focus of her work. Rocio is passionate about using narrative inquiry and practices while she supervises and trains future therapists at a women's substance facility where women are trying to reclaim their lives from substance use. She currently has a private practice and works with youth, their families, and individuals seeking to live a life they prefer. Rocio enjoys time on the beach, baking with her husband and daughters, and walking her dog Sahara.

My ancestry es Muisca, African and South European de Colombia. Como inmigrante en los United States (U.S.), I am a part of the faculty team in the family therapy and Spanglish decolonial healing programs at San Diego State university located in Kumeyay land. Mi trabajo de supervisión, teaching, research, and therapy in my immigrant English are informed by the Australasian narrative therapy and U.S. Black feminism. En my Español Colombiano y Spanglish, I am particularly interested in Andean decoloniality, decolonial feminismos and Chicanx borderland activismo as a response to Eurocentrism. I am a practicing licensed Marriage and Family Therapist en los Estados de California and Texas and Supervisor.

Beth Prullage (she/her) is a Licensed Independent Clinical Social Worker from Easthampton, MA. She is an Adjunct Professor at the Smith College School for Social Work, where she has taught narrative therapy since 2007. She currently works at the Counseling Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she is a supervisor in the training program, and also is the Co-Coordinator of the Groups Program.

Lynne V. Rosen, LCSW (Pasadena, California) has been engaged in therapeutic work for over 36 years in medical, residential, inpatient, community, and private practice settings. She found her therapeutic and philosophical home in the early 90s when she traveled to New York to hear Michael White and David Epston. During the past several decades, she has focused her attention on integrating somatic-inspired EMDR, Somatic Therapies, and Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB) with a Narrative approach in a way that remains philosophically and ethically aligned. Lynne has worked toward unsettling Western ideologies and practices related to body-based/somatic therapies and ecotherapy, moving toward more inclusive anti-racist and decolonizing practices and cultural somatics. Co-constructing different kinds of scaffolding using sensations, images/visual metaphors, dreams, radical imagination, and memories in less linear ways creates space for greater agency, reclamation, a sense of aliveness, and new possibilities for relating to ourselves, community members, and the other-than-human world. An Embodying Conversations course is in process for Re-Authoring Teaching. Lynne continues to feel passionate about teaching, supervising, and public conversation work, and for many years, she had the privilege of working as Core Faculty and Director of the Postmodern Therapy Training Program at PGI and Co-Founder of WPLA (Women’s Project Los Angeles).

Akansha Vaswani-Bye, PhD is a licensed counseling psychologist born and raised in Mumbai and currently lives in Seattle. She is a principal faculty member in the SPIRIT (Supporting Psychosis Innovation through Research, Implementation, & Training) Center in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Washington. Her current research and training efforts are focused on developing and supporting the family peer community who care for loved ones living with the effects of problematic psychotic states. She is also an attending psychologist at an HIV primary care clinic located in a public hospital in Seattle. She is leading and co-leading research projects that are adapting a single-session narrative therapy approach aimed at improving access to mental health care among people living with HIV and at risk for HIV in integrated and community-based care settings. As a doctoral scholar, her research focused on the ethical and medical-legal issues that arise in psychiatry due to academic-industry relationships and solutions for reform. She was first introduced to narrative practices when she worked at Ummeed Child Development Center in Mumbai where she was fortunate to learn these ideas from Peggy Sax, Shona Russell, Maggie Carey, and Jehanzeb Baldiwala. She has been a Board Member of Re-Authoring Teaching since 2016.

Navid Zamani, PhD is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist who specializes in supporting Middle Eastern refugees dealing with domestic violence. As a Persian-American based in San Diego, CA, he integrates decolonial poststructural feminism within a narrative therapy framework. Dr. Zamani also serves as a lecturer at San Diego State University and is the Clinical Director at License to Freedom, a nonprofit organization focused on helping Middle Eastern refugees impacted by domestic violence. He provides clinical supervision to a team of therapist trainees at License to Freedom. His research and scholarship emphasizes the role of affect in narrative therapy, working with couples experiencing violence and high conflict, and linguistic justice for multilingual communities.