Our team.

About Steph
Steph is a registered Creative Arts Therapist (AThR, ANZACATA), holding a Masters of Therapeutic Arts Practice from MIECAT (2024). She works with individuals aged 13–60, mother-daughter dyads, and those navigating anxiety, grief, and late-identified neurodivergence. Alongside her professional training, Steph brings personal lived experience of neurodivergence, grief, climate anxiety, and disability – a foundation that deepens her capacity for genuine, non-judgmental connection.

Press Pause Studio is the realisation of Steph's long-held vision: a welcoming space that invites self-reflection, creative expression, and accessible mental health support across the lifespan.

Why Arts, not Art?

Creative Arts Therapy is also called Art Therapy (and in some cases Expressive Arts Therapy) these terms are for the most part interchangeable. Here at Press Pause Studio we use the term arts to indicate all the possibilities that may arise in the process of expressing yourself through arts materials and modalities. Bring your curiosity.

Arts Therapy at Press Pause Studio provides a space guided entirely by you and your needs, where expression can move fluidly between talking, making, and moving – or beyond. Through practice and in building a collaborative working relationship together you will begin to lean in to your intuition.

For example: Feel like cutting and pasting a collage? Squeezing clay? Writing a poem? Silently making a cocoon to sit within? Splashing paint? Moving your body? Acting out a scenario? Or simply needing to feel heard without judgment? All of this, could be part of a session.

My role is to be alongside you, perhaps in conversation (however you choose to communicate your needs) as you explore what is going on for you. I am here however you show up. You are the expert of your own experience. You might just need some assistance to learn how to access that inner wisdom.

Professional Standards & Training

Creative Arts Therapy is a recognised allied health profession. ANZACATA is a member of Allied Health Professions Australia (AHPA), ensuring Steph meets rigorous standards through registration, annual professional development, and ongoing professional supervision.

Steph's practice springs from the MIECAT approach, which centres relationality, multimodality, emergence, and lived experiencing – creating space for clients to reconnect with and trust their own inner knowledge.

She has recently completed additional training with the Sensorimotor Institute in Healing Trauma with Guided Drawing – a technique using bilateral drawing and rhythmic, repetitive movement to address experiences held in the body. Drawing on somatic experiencing and other theories, this approach works with trauma without requiring clients to revisit details, reducing the risk of re-traumatisation.