Story Portrait Workshop

About this Event

Making a story portrait using photographic images, can offer healing insight for participants as they create their own personal collage/story portrait about their trauma/grief journey as a suicide loss survivor and/or as a professional working with survivors of one’s death by suicide. Story Portrait participants are guided through the workshop with a series of questions as they develop their collage/story portrait. The workshop allows individuals to express feelings, practice self-care, and connect with others who have also experienced trauma and loss as a result of having experienced one’s death by suicide.

Story Portrait Participants will the Story Portrait™

• Receive validation for the ups and downs of how life changes after loss/trauma from a death by suicide
• Connect with their sensory input systems and allow for neural integration─ ensuring that they can connect with, and benefit from, the activities.
• Choose images and use the elements provided by SSC’s Story Portrait art facilitator in order to express their loss story through personal symbols, images, and words, or with only images when there are no words.

Participants will also receive a copy of the Suicide Survivor Club’s (SSC) award-winning five-book set, written by SSC founder, Becky Anderson and her family, that showcases the healing power of visual narrative as an expression and tool that helped them cope and move through their lived trauma as survivors of their husband/father’s death by suicide. The book set is ideal as a healing tool for oneself, with a therapist, or in a support group. 

Story Portrait Facilitator Kris Frykman is SSC’s art therapist. She has degrees in Fine Arts, Art Education, Written and Visual Storytelling (Art Therapy), and certifications in facilitating art therapy support groups and in crisis counseling. As an artist, her sculptures, paintings, and mixed-media art have been on display throughout the US and in Africa. As an educator, she has taught K-12 art, and since 2002, she continues to teach graduate and undergraduate students at Metropolitan State University. As an art therapist/crisis counselor, she has written art therapy support group curriculum, facilitated numerous support groups and has offered trainings to professionals on facilitating art therapy support groups for survivors of trauma.

Cost of Event: FREE

Register to save your spot as space is limited to 15 attendees per workshop!