Dr. Renée Pitre is a Registered Drama Therapist, Board Certified Trainer, and a Licensed Professional Counselor. She has 13 years of clinical experience in delivering trauma-centered Drama Therapy and psychotherapy to children, adolescents, and adults who have experienced traumatic events.
Renée began her career as a drama therapist at the Post Traumatic Stress Center, in New Haven, CT, and as a founding member of the A.L.I.V.E school program. She is the former training director of iWest, a satellite of the Institute for Developmental Transformations (DvT) and has trained students in DvT all over the world, particularly in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, the Czech Republic, China, Ireland, and in Canada.
An adjunct instructor and course designer at Lesley University for the past 4 years, Renée’s focus has been in the development of the clinical instruction section of the Drama Therapy master's degree program. She is curious about the pedagogy of drama therapy and the particular ways we can teach clinical reasoning to emerging drama therapists. Renée has also served as adjunct faculty to California Institute of Integral Studies and New York University.
Before her drama therapy career, Renée hailed from the far north of Canada. Some may say that her abstract and expansive thinking mirror the vast terrain of her upbringing. Thusly, Renée’s research focuses on the co-creation of the therapeutic environment and the dimensional layers within this dramatic conversation and what we might glean from them.
She has a particular interest in the curation of scaffolding to support in-depth reflective processing for training therapists post clinical sessions and in generating mindfulness in the distinction between ‘caring for self’ and ‘self-care’ in emerging drama therapists. A believer in the artistic creation and the open access to knowledge, Renée has also created and hosted a podcast, and continues to maintain connection to her own evolving artistic expression through writing, gestural drawings, and DvT.