Abby Spilka’s path to grief counseling was not linear, but it was always there. At NYU, she found the language and training to turn a lifelong thread of care into her life’s work.
At A Glance
Alum
R. Abby Spilka
Undergraduate Program
BA in Classical Civilizations, University of California at Los Angeles
Program
MA in Counseling for Mental Health and Wellness (2016)
Professional Pathway
Counselor in Private Practice and Death Educator
The Work of Grief
On any given week, R. Abby Spilka sits with people in some of the most tender moments of their lives. In her Brooklyn private practice, she works with individuals and couples navigating loss, such as the death of a parent, a partner, or a child. She facilitates support groups for bereaved parents and teaches grief and bereavement counseling to the next generation of clinicians. The work is steady, intentional, and deeply human.
This clarity of purpose did not come in a straight line. Before earning her MA in Counseling for Mental Health and Wellness in Applied Psychology at NYU Steinhardt in 2016, Abby built a career in communications and museum leadership. For years, she worked at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, guiding crisis communications through national tragedies and shaping how stories of loss were told publicly. She also volunteered in hospice settings for more than a decade, sitting by patients' bedsides in their final hours. The throughline was there; she just had not named it yet.
Taking the Grief & Bereavement elective helped me understand death on a much deeper level than my own volunteer work. I gained a mentor, and now I teach the course with her blessing.
From Experience to Expertise
Returning to graduate school in her forties, Abby was seeking alignment rather than reinvention. Within the CMHW program, that alignment is sharpened through rigorous clinical training and field placement. One course in particular became a turning point: the Grief and Bereavement elective. Until then, Abby understood death through lived experience and volunteer service. In that classroom, she encountered frameworks that helped her understand grief as a psychological, social, and cultural process.
That relationship extended beyond graduation. Today, Abby teaches the very course that once transformed her thinking with her former professor’s blessing, Dr. Christiane Manzella.
The program did not simply prepare Abby to become a licensed counselor; it clarified her purpose and connected her to a community of practitioners committed to compassionate care. Her path since graduation has woven together clinical work, education, and public engagement. During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Abby served as a bereavement counselor at Calvary Hospital, supporting families navigating unprecedented isolation and loss. The clinical foundations she developed in the CMHW program became essential in those moments. In 2023, she transitioned fully into private practice while continuing to teach at NYU.
Advice for Students
Abby’s journey informs how she mentors students today. She knows that meaningful careers are often layered. Communications skills learned decades earlier now help her speak publicly about grief, and hospice volunteering deepened her comfort with death long before she entered graduate school. She reminds her students that purpose is something discovered through engagement, not something declared at the outset.
Looking back, Abby sees the CMHW program as the place where her interests coalesced into a professional direction. The program gave her the language and clinical foundation to turn compassion into a vocation. For prospective students, her path offers reassurance: your trajectory need not be linear to be meaningful. What matters is the willingness to follow the questions that persist.