What It’s Like To…Be an Art Therapist in Egypt

So she embarked on her second career shift: becoming an independent art therapist and counselor. “I studied psychology and art therapy, theater and dance movement therapy,” Shenouda says. “Having all these threads enabled me to work through arts in a therapeutic way: using art while keeping an eye on wellbeing and trauma-informed facilitation.”

In Cairo, a cultural melting pot that is home to various populations, many of whom had to flee their countries as refugees, Shenouda brings together communities through her art therapy workshops. Over the course of several days, she designs trauma-sensitive programs consisting of visual arts, movement, and theater.

In 2017, she began working on UN Women programs about gender and sex based violence (GSBV), as part of the Cairo-based arts and wellbeing organization Dawar. Her initial workshops were geared towards women — consisting of 70 percent refugees from different nationalities, mainly Sudan, Eritrea, Syria, Yemen, and recently, Palestine and 30 percent Egyptians — with the intention to promote integration.

Since the beginning of the wars in Sudan and Gaza, there has been a need for war trauma workshops that include both men and women. The Arab Digital Expression Foundation (ADEF) secured funding for Shenouda to hold trauma healing workshops, of which she has given three so far. Most recently, she became the co-director for education and programming at Alwan & Awtar, an Egyptian NGO that works towards self-development and expression through art with children.

Shenouda speaks to OkayAfrica about the process of facilitating art therapy in segments edited for length and clarity.

Amany Shenouda: After I left my NGO job, my friends were calling me to start our own agency or sending me job positions. I told them, ‘Relax, I need some time to see what I want to do with my life right now.’ My question to myself was, ‘What really makes me feel alive?’ And I realized that the answer is two things: art — it’s what makes me feel like my soul is leaving the space even though I’m still there — and supporting people.

At that time, I was studying counseling, not to turn it into a career, [but] just because I was interested in the inner world of human beings. So I had these two things that I didn’t know what to do with, and I started googling how to combine them. In 2014, I came across art therapy before there were many schools and courses for it in Egypt. I got in contact with Steward Curbly, a process art facilitator and author of process art books. I enrolled in his workshops and later in his facilitators’ training. For me, it was something new; it wasn’t art as I knew it, because it focuses on the process rather than the product, and it opened a new horizon for me.

In my workshops and programs, I like to weave different art modalities together, including visual arts like painting, sculpting and image theater, as well as dance movement. Even though I am first and foremost a painter, weaving different arts together gives so much richness, meaning, and diversity.

I always start my workshops saying that participants don’t need any artistic skills at all, and I learned that artists can be the most difficult people to work with because they’re so full of a product they want to get out. With them, I have to call for unlearning first. We’re not painting a piece for a museum, we’re playing with colors. We’re not performing a dance, we’re just letting our bodies move.

When I worked with women only, we mainly focused on gender-based and sexual violence, opening up a space for participants to process and realize their own trauma and abusive relationships. Many participants were survivors of gender-based and sexual violence. Through the exercises that were designed to connect to their own feelings and understand what’s going on in their lives, they could gain the insight that what was happening to them was abuse and that it wasn’t normal.

Since 2023, the workshops [have focused] on sharing and processing war trauma and giving participants tools to regulate their emotions. Traumatic memories or stories are processed in an artistic way. Traumatic memories or stories are processed in an artistic way, so that it doesn’t retraumatize. Whatever appears, we work with and integrate in what we call creative expressions.

Working with people who have war trauma is very sensitive. I design my programs to facilitate healing, even though healing is a huge word, through emotional regulation, having a sense of community and calming the nervous system.

Outside of these workshops, I also do talk therapy and one-on-one counseling, which deals with what’s happening in the thoughts. Art works in a different way, mainly through projection or embodiment; it takes the trauma and puts it in front of you, so that it’s not inside of you anymore. Instead, it’s outside and you see it in visual arts, you embody it in a way in drama or make creative expression from it through storytelling as a narrative.

When a person has trauma or PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder), the logical part of the brain shuts down and we’re in fight, flight or freeze mode. We don’t have access to logic, we’re just in survival mode. Through art, we address a different part of the brain so that we can access information, emotions, and wisdoms that are stored there, and process them in a different way.

The effect of art therapy starts in the workshops and floods into participants’ lives in a gentle, organic manner. I remember one participant shared that she felt imprisoned in her body since she came to Cairo, and while we were moving, for the first time she felt like her body was free. She went home and danced with her children. This work requires full presence, awareness, and sensitivity as I work organically with what appears in the room and what the group needs in the moment.

There’s another participant that I can’t forget. In a puppetry workshop, I laid out all the materials and told them to make their own puppet. She came to me and said, ‘No, I’m not going to do this exercise, I don’t know how to do it.’ I just looked into her eyes and said, ‘You'll do a beautiful one, I know you will.’ I can’t forget about the moment after, when we were sharing our experience with the group in a circle, she said, ‘I believed in myself when I saw it in Amany’s eyes, and that never happened before.’ It was a really emotional moment, it gave me goosebumps. Having the space to give a person this feeling, that they are valuable regardless of what they do, for me is the whole world.

We connect, have fun and share our cultures. People might bring food from their own culture and show each other their cultural dances. I hear a lot of, ‘I’ve never talked with a Sudanese, Syrian, etcetera before and you’re so kind and nice.’ People who come here normally meet Egyptians in a formal way, through paperwork, but they don’t really merge and connect with people as human beings.

I don’t consider myself working. This is my passion. It’s just really rewarding, being with a group that tries art for the first time in their lives, who find beauty in the things they’re doing. Not by the common judgment that this is a good or bad painting or move, but finding the beauty in themselves in the process and believing in themselves. Seeing people find hope in themselves is — I can’t even describe how I feel about it. It’s so beautiful.

If you or someone you know who would benefit from Shenouda’s workshops, are in Cairo, you can find her through her website Barah Expressive Art and the organizations she currently works with: ADEF (Arab Digital Expressive Foundation), Dawar for Arts and Development, Alwan & Awtar.