Licensed Clinical Professional Art Therapist/Founder, Creative Director
CWW Workshop Facilitator

Gioia is also a registered and board-certified art therapist. She holds licenses as a Clinical Professional Art Therapist (LCPAT) in Maryland and Certified Substance Abuse Counselor (CSAC) in Virginia.

Gioia serves as one of CWW’s primary workshop facilitators and continuing education coordinators.  Her wide-ranging clinical background includes working as an art therapist with adults experiencing mental illness, those who are incarcerated, young people in foster care and special education settings, adults in substance abuse treatment, women facing cancer, community college students, and those seeking treatment for traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress. Learning from these different groups of people, Gioia’s built skills in leading not just art therapy, but also action methods and improvisation, adventure-based experiential education on low-ropes courses, therapeutic writing, and nature-based mindfulness.  The common thread in her work has been the devastating impact stress and trauma has on our wellbeing and the power of creative art and play to reset and restore the stressed-out brain and body, so we can have more joyful fun, and feel more love, serenity and peace. 

Along with being a clinician, Gioia also has a substantive academic background: She has taught at undergraduate, graduate and doctoral levels and presents on positive art therapy internationally. Gioia is on the faculty at The George Washington University and publishes regularly on such topics as positive art therapy, positive emotions and art therapy, and arts-based research, which is the innovative use of art as a research method.  She was a Provost Fellow at Drexel University’s Creative Arts Therapies Ph.D. Program where she completed original research on the expression of positive emotions in art, which won the Torrance Research Award from the American Creativity Association.  Gioia has been instrumental in theorizing arts-based research, and published on this topic in the textbooks Handbook of Arts-based Research, Oxford Handbook of Qualitative Methods, and Art as Research: Opportunities & Challenges, with her collaborators.  She has been an External Dissertation Committee Member, Master’s Thesis Supervisor, Data Analysis Consultant, and a Peer Reviewer for journals such as Review of General Psychology, The Arts in Psychotherapy, and Frontiers in Psychology and was a founding Associate Editor for the journal Art/Research International. She recently published arts-based research on using process painting in clinical art therapy supervision in addiction treatment (Click here to see Gioia’s Professional CV).

In addition to being a practicing artist (see her playful art on Instagram @gioiachilton), Gioia has a special passion for social justice, and building community through projects such as altered books and collaborative art swaps.  She lives with her family (and dog!) in Alexandria, VA.  Gioia’s brightness and generally cheerful disposition naturally embodies the optimism and self-compassion that CWW teaches.

Gioia is a registered and board-certified art therapist with over 30 years of clinical experience. She holds licenses as a Clinical Professional Art Therapist (LCPAT) in Maryland and Certified Substance Abuse Counselor (CSAC) in Virginia.

Gioia is on the faculty at George Washington University and publishes regularly on such topics Positive Art Therapy, Positive Emotions and Art Therapy, and Arts-Based Research.

In addition to being a practicing artist, Gioia has a special passion for communal art projects such as Altered Books and collaborative art swaps.  She, her husband and two daughters, and Barley, the Golden Lab, live in Alexandria, VA.  Gioia’s brightness and generally cheerful disposition naturally embodies the optimism that CWW teaches.