Rakshanda Khan is an Art Therapist and Registered Psychotherapist with certifications in Trauma-Informed Expressive Arts therapy and Humanistic Integrative counselling. She practises from a client-centered, strengths-based, anti-racist and anti-oppressive framework that recognizes that we all embody creative resources that we can access for personal growth. She maintains a critical self-consciousness in her work, considering sociopolitical and biopsychosocial contexts to individual concerns. Her approach is built on collaboration, and a deep reverence for lived experience.
Rakshanda is passionate about graphic medicine, digital and online creative processes, as well as traditional arts practices to guide healing. She believes that comics can be a powerful tool for self expression and healing, and that you don’t have to be a skilled artist to make comics or to benefit from them. In 2020, she conducted research on using comics in online art therapy with Pakistani adolescents, and you can read about it here. For this, she was awarded the Canadian Art Therapy Association Student Research Grant.
In her spare time, Rakshanda enjoys swimming, long walks in nature, reading, drawing comics and other forms of artmaking. She is also slowly building a Fluevog collection.