About Kate

Kate Keenan is a Toronto-based expressive arts therapist, community song leader, composer, performer, and writer. She is a graduate of The CREATE Institute’s Intermodal Expressive Arts Therapy program, and her work brings together therapy, the arts, and community-based creative practice.

Kate works with adults, children, youth, families, and groups, using visual art, movement, music, drama, writing, image-making, play, and song to support expression, connection, and emotional processing. Her approach is grounded, relational, trauma-informed, and responsive to what feels most accessible and alive for each person or group. Artistic skill is never the point. The work is about curiosity, relationship, and discovering what can emerge when experience is given a form outside of words.

Kate’s therapeutic and community work includes trauma-informed group facilitation with children and families through The Child Development Institute’s Here to Help program, expressive arts therapy groups and one-on-one support at Armagh House, and individual and group work with women navigating trauma, housing instability, and gender-based violence at Margaret’s Housing and Community Support Services. She has also facilitated arts-based programs with newcomer and ESL students through the TDSB’s LEAP program, and with children, youth, and adults with diverse access needs.

Community singing is central to Kate’s practice. She leads accessible, non-performance-based song circles for women, families, and communities, including Singing Mamas, Songbirds, and Singing Together with newcomer seniors through Access Alliance. She has also co-facilitated song circles centred around grief, where shared voice, repetition, breath, and harmony offered a gentle container for emotional expression, remembrance, and connection.

Before moving more fully into therapeutic and community-based work, Kate spent many years creating and performing music, theatre, and television for children and families. She brings this background in performance, songwriting, therapeutic clowning at Sick Kids Hospital, and collaborative art-making into her current practice, along with a deep respect for play, imagination, attunement, and the many ways people communicate beyond words.

Across all of her work, Kate is interested in creating spaces where people can feel less alone, more connected to themselves and others, and more able to meet their experiences with gentleness, imagination, and care.