Danyelle Mei Kaplan

Dan (she/they) is an experienced Accredited Mental Health Social Worker with 9+ years of experience working in clinical and community settings in Warrang (Sydney) and New York City. They have specialist experience working with LGBTQIA+ young people, dynamics of power and control, complex trauma and homelessness. Their practice draws on narrative therapy, schema therapy, cognitive behavioural therapy, harm reduction and trauma-informed therapeutic frameworks.

Dan is committed to using non-pathologising, empowering and person-directed approaches to therapy. They are passionate about centering anti-oppressive practice principles in their practice, including social and racial justice, intersectionality, self-determination, transformative justice and decolonisation. They are diversity- and sex work-positive.

They believe that a respectful, radical therapeutic relationship is more like walking alongside each other, rather than a top-down power dynamic. Dan aims to create a safe, affirming environment to explore people’s unique ways of being and knowing together, with empathy and curiosity, and help people achieve their goals.

Dan’s lived experience as a polycultural feminine-spectrum person of colour, and a member of the LGBTQIA+ community, gives them a nuanced understanding of the complex ways in which systems of power and oppression can impact the wellbeing of folks who occupy diverse intersections of identity and lived experience.

Dan acknowledges and pays respect to the Gadigal people of the Eora nation, the traditional owners of the land they are privileged to live, work and create on. Always was, always will be Aboriginal Land.

Find out more on Dan’s website.