Meet the Team
by the Creatives Care team
Artists face idiosyncratic challenges in their line of work—unpredictable hours, job insecurity, and performance anxiety, to name a few. We believe that finding affordable, high-quality mental health care does not have to be one of them. At Creatives Care, each team member knows firsthand the importance that the wellbeing of artists has on the future of the arts. Meet the creators behind Creatives Care and the unique stories that fuel their commitment to this meaningful work.
Photo by Andrew Werner
Alana Mendelsohn MD PhD, Co-founder
Creatives Care is a project that brings together some of my longest and most important passions: social justice, mental health and the arts. I’ve always held a strong passion for the arts, spending much of my free time growing up playing violin, acting in school theater productions, making pottery or mosaics and going to art museums. During my psychiatric training, I had the privilege of working with inspiring patients who were artists and found it deeply gratifying to not only support their mental health recovery, but see how it intersected with their evolving artistic practice.
When it came to thinking about the kind of clinical practice I wanted to foster after finishing my training, I knew that I wanted to make working with artists a priority. But I also knew that artists faced a lot of barriers to treatment. While in graduate school, friends in the performing arts frequently spoke of their difficulty navigating the health care system with either lousy insurance or no insurance at all. New York may have some of the best mental health training programs in the country as well as an astounding array of clinics and providers, but mental health treatment here is expensive and navigating resources can be really confusing unless you know someone who works in the system who can provide guidance.
I figured there had to be more providers out there like me who had a passion for the arts and wanted to work with artists. It occurred to me that if we found a way to bring these mental health providers together, we could create a network that artists could tap into when looking for affordable treatment with providers who care about their needs as artists.
I would add that Creatives Care, while focused on the arts, serves a broader mission. We believe that mental health care is a form of health care, and that it should be accessible to all. While we ultimately hope to build a society that prioritizes universal, affordable health care, we can continue in the meantime to create resources within our communities that make it easier for anyone who wants affordable mental health treatment to find it.
Catherine Hancock, Co-founder
Even though I am no longer a full-time performer, I'll always identify as an artist. I now work in agency-side marketing and communications, and explaining my background to clients and colleagues can be a bit challenging: I received my undergraduate and master's degrees at The Juilliard School, an artist diploma from The New School, and had a professional performance career. When asked why I left the industry, I usually respond with an appropriate platitude about how I decided I wanted more stability in my life and didn't have the right personality type to be an opera singer.
In reality, while in my master's, I experienced an injury that easily could have been avoided. The fallout that followed was a classic example of how the industry isn't equipped to support the mental and physical needs of performance-related hazards, which are sadly all too common. While I did successfully recover and began performing professionally again, the career path I had been on before my injury was no longer viable for me, emotionally or practically. It is not advised to be public about vocal injuries, but I felt the need to be open about my struggles. In doing so, I learned how typical my experience is and how many people feel alone in their struggles unnecessarily.
After leaving full-time performance six years ago, I entered in-house development and marketing before moving into the for-profit sector. When Covid struck, I felt a deep concern for the well-being of artists as it seemed direct and institutional support was sparse. Having gone through the identity crisis that my injury ensued, I felt like I was watching an entire generation go through something similar all at once, which left me feeling both troubled and galvanized.
In the first year of the pandemic, Alana, Eric, and I had a conversation that resulted in the founding of Creatives Care. In discussing how to best support the future of the arts during this devastating time, we landed on a model that directly provides artists with much-needed affordable mental healthcare. Having experienced first-hand the toll this career can take, I'm excited to be part of an organization that has identified tactical solutions to a specific and critical need in a community I love.
Eric Kohlmann, Co-founder
The arts– and music especially – have always been an important part of my life. I remember browsing through our classical music CD collection at home as a child, exploring as many composers from as many time periods as I could get my hands on. It wasn't too long before I became fascinated by the people behind the music and inspired by the stories behind major composers and musicians.
Whenever I moved to a new city, be it Zurich, São Paulo, Madrid or New York, I identified the main venues of classical music to connect with the wider community over something I loved. Music has greatly enriched my life, not just wonderful sound, but also friendships and a sense of grounding in a new place through a universal language.
In my day-to-day work in venture capital, I meet with many entrepreneurs and investors to think about hard problems in the world and how to solve them. Helping to build teams and seeing them turn into organizations is incredibly satisfying and the most powerful way to find and scale solutions.
Creatives Care combines these passions, helping sustain the arts by supporting artists who seek mental health treatment. It's a grassroots effort that puts the makers of great art and their needs at the center. We are building a venue to connect three communities– artists, providers and supporters of the arts– to engage with each other through a common language to talk about mental health.
Amy M. Rosenthal LCSW, Clinical Director
What feels like a lifetime ago, I moved to New York to be an actor. While trying to navigate living alone in a new city, paying student loans, and not being able to afford health insurance, I worked full-time in various unsatisfying jobs while taking acting classes – and in my "spare time," auditioning. But I realized that if I had to work full-time, I wanted to do something that felt meaningful.
Sometimes a therapist can change the course of our lives. Mine recognized my interest in psychology and desire to help others. She recommended I volunteer as a crisis counselor. Once there, I discovered that I wanted to learn more strategies for helping others survive and thrive after traumatic experiences. I no longer wanted to be a performer. I wanted to be a therapist.
Now, I am an NYU and Columbia-educated clinical social worker and psychotherapist with a practice based in New York City. It has been very satisfying to draw on my own experiences and training to help the actors, dancers, writers, and musicians whom I have counseled.
From my tenure in community mental health and city agencies serving under-resourced patients, I have become passionate about making sure clients from all walks of life have access to quality care. In my role with Creatives Care, I hope to provide a space where performers and providers can gain a better understanding of artists’ challenges and emotional needs, and enable artists of all backgrounds with the understanding and support that will help them fully realize their talents.
Jordan Rubenstein, Director of Marketing and Clinical Outreach
I’ve loved both science and music for as long as I can remember. From a young age, I pursued opportunities to explore these passions, studying guitar at Interlochen’s Summer Arts Program, honing laboratory skills in research fellowships, and gaining clinical experience shadowing physicians. In college, this interest continued to grow and I earned my undergraduate degree in neuroscience and music. My formal career as a singer began in 2019, when I graduated from college and joined the Hyannis Sound, Cape Cod’s professional singing group.
In my two years serving as the Hyannis Sound’s music director, I gained exposure to both the immense gratification of a career in the performing arts and the significant pressures – physical, psychological, and financial. Leading the group, a 10-man choir who relied on live performances, through the summer of 2020, I witnessed more specifically how the particular intersection of the pandemic and a career in the performing arts gave rise to mental issues and illnesses. As the son of a psychoanalyst, I’ve always admired the value of therapy as a tool for combating these challenges.
Working with Creatives Care has given me the opportunity to share this tool with a community that I hold dear – a community that has traditionally not been given easy access to this tool. Formalizing this network of artists, providers, and supporters of the arts challenges our current system of mental health care, and works towards a broader mission of accessible mental health care for all.
Currently I serve as a producer and creative director at Haystack Needle, a design and production agency, so I lend my experience in social media and creative production to the team. I’m also currently in the application process for medical school and hope to pursue a career that lets me continue to support artists in my medical practice (hopefully as a laryngologist!).
Katya Gruzglina, Director of Educational Content
As an undergraduate student at Juilliard, I remember being introduced to this well-known adage: “if you can imagine yourself doing anything other than music as a career, do it.” To this day, I am not sure what the intention of this message was but the implication was clear: any thoughts of another career would be in direct conflict with my success as a singer and would invalidate me as an artist. I decided then that I would singularly focus on one thing and one thing only– being an opera singer. Unfortunately, in the midst of this pursuit I sustained a vocal injury at age 20 that, like many injuries, probably could have been avoided had I known how to set proper boundaries and how to take care of myself not only physically, but mentally.
Sustaining an injury while in school is devastating, especially when you feel that your sole source of identity is in your music-making. My journey to recovery proved not only physical, but more importantly, mental. Although I was greatly helped by a speech pathologist, true recovery only came with the help of a mental health professional who helped me understand the meaning that being an artist held in my life and my identity. Through our work together, we delved into my family history, explored how my fear of becoming re-injured hindered my recovery, and actively addressed the anxiety and depression that I was facing at that time. Most importantly, therapy helped me to have agency in my own life and meaning-making process, and in turn, helped me make the first choice that I felt was really made for myself: the choice to become a therapist.
In great part due to therapy, I’ve cultivated a joyous life that actively challenges the notion of a singularly focused existence: I continue to sing professionally and teach– all while pursuing my new path to becoming a mental health professional. Joining Creatives Care fuels my goal to fuse mental wellness with the overall wellness of artists: mental health has a direct effect on the vocal apparatus and self-expression of all kinds, and I believe you cannot achieve artistic health without mental health. Connecting artists to affordable, quality mental healthcare with providers that understand the struggles of being an artist is a meaningful first step in meeting this need, and I could not be more excited to take part in this endeavor.
