Angelle Cook (she/her/hers), PhD, is a registered drama therapist (RDT) and a board-certified trainer (BCT) through the NADTA. Dr. Cook runs her own private practice in Northern Virginia where she works with teens and adults at the intersections of dis/ability, chronic illness, and mental illness. For ten years, she worked at a nonprofit and used the therapeutic theater model with teens and young adults with multiple types of dis/abilities to tell their stories. As director of the therapeutic theater productions from 2011-2020, her participants performed in front of more than 80,000 middle and high school students as well as to a sold-out audience at The Kennedy Center with the production, “A Will To Survive,” a show about teen suicide.
Dr. Cook is an associate professor at Lesley University and an adjunct at NYU Steinhardt and Antioch in their drama therapy programs. She previously taught at George Mason University within their mindfulness living LLC and within “Mason Life,” a college program designed for adults with dis/abilities.
She is the Managing Editor for the Drama Therapy Review. With the NADTA, Dr. Cook has served on the research committee for the past two years. With the research committee, she is part of a Delphi study on drama therapy core processes, as well as a research initiative she created which encourages new research and scholarship in the field of drama therapy. The research project received a grant from the Drama Therapy Fund.
Dr. Cook holds a master’s in theater education from Emerson College and completed her drama therapy coursework through the alternative track program. Angelle earned her PhD in expressive arts therapy from Lesley University. She is the author of one historical fiction novel,
The Artist and the Soldier which won the Ben Franklin Award through the Independent Book Publishers Association in 2019.
Courses
Advanced Theory and Research in Drama Therapy
Research Interests
- Drama Therapy Research and Scholarship
- Therapeutic Theatre
Selected Publications
- Cook, A. (2020). Using an inclusive therapeutic theatre production to teach self-advocacy skills in young people with disabilities. The Arts in Psychotherapy, 71.
- Cook, A. (2020). Exploring Inclusion in a Therapeutic Theater Production. DigitalCommons@Lesley. (Dissertation which received the Dissertation Research Fellowship Award and the Drama Therapy Fund Dissertation Award for Empirical Research)
- Cook, A (2021). A post-intentional phenomenological investigation of inclusivity in a therapeutic theatre production. Drama Therapy Review, Forthcoming September 2021.