Tonia Herrero

Tonia Herrero is the owner and founder of East Bay Art Therapy. Tonia is a cisgendered woman with Spanish, Ashkenazi, Irish and Native American (Sac and Fox) ancestry. Tonia is a Board-Certified Art Therapist and Certified Art Therapy Supervisor with the Art Therapy Credentials Board, a Licensed Certified Art Therapist in the state of Oregon and a Certified Addictions-Informed Mental Health Professional (CAIMHP). She has over a decade of clinical experience and specializes in working with adolescent boys who have been conditioned to suppress their emotions and therefore have turned to unhealthy coping mechanisms such as using substances. She helps them to access, express and process emotions and trauma while finding healthy and creative ways to cope without the use of substances. Tonia has long term sobriety/recovery herself and is passionate about working with teens and adults of all ages and genders in recovery or wanting to enter recovery from substance-abuse. She also has extensive experience working with individuals with mood disorders such as bipolar disorder.

Tonia's approach to art therapy is trauma-informed and draws influence from Relational Psychodynamic, Internal Family Systems (IFS), and Humanistic theories such as Person-Centered, Existential, and Gestalt. She is also trained in Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) which also informs her approach. Tonia is a Health At Every Size (HAES) and Intuitive Eating informed therapist which informs her work when her clients may be struggling with their relationship to food and body image.

Tonia obtained her Bachelors of Fine Arts from California College of the Arts, an Art Teaching Credential from CSU East Bay, and a Masters of Professional Studies in Art Therapy and Creativity Development from Pratt Institute. Tonia has a long history of facilitating the powerful therapeutic relationship between art and young people. In her first career, she developed and directed an art academy at a public high school in Oakland where she was a full-time art teacher for ten years. Inspired by the healing power of the arts and the relationships she built with her students, Tonia decided to return to her hometown of Brooklyn, New York to pursue graduate studies in Art Therapy. During her graduate program, Tonia furthered her passion for adolescents as she completed various clinical internships providing individual and group art therapy to adolescents with complex trauma, justice-involvement, and other behavioral and mental health concerns in both residential and school settings. Tonia has held various positions as an art therapist at facilities across the bay area such as; residential treatment facilities for teens and young adults, transitional housing for adults, inpatient psychiatric hospitals, and K-12 public schools.

Tonia founded East Bay Art Therapy in March of 2019. As a business owner, therapist, supervisor, educator and artist, Tonia is actively working towards social justice-oriented, liberatory and decolonial practices.

In her free time, Tonia enjoys making colorful abstract art using a variety of 2D media. She is passionate about expressing her creativity through fashion; making jewelry, dyeing and screen printing clothes, and doing hair, makeup and nail art. You can also find her practicing yoga, dancing to hip-hop, playing tennis, and cuddling with her beloved dogs, a Dalmatian and Rottweiler.

Tonia sees clients at the Oakland Office on Wednesdays only. She also works off-site facilitating trainings, professional development, and workplace wellness workshops throughout the SF Bay Area. Tonia is available for consultation services.